Defining basic health benefits: lessons learned from the Oregon Health Plan.

The Oregon Health Plan was instituted in 1994 with the goal of assuring basic health care for everyone in the state. The plan used an innovative public process to rank health services as its method of defining basic health care benefits. Due to its inability to constrain health care costs and an economic recession in the state, many of the plan's core elements are no longer operational. This essay outlines lessons learned from the Oregon Health plan's successes and failures and describes a new process of health reform that began in Oregon in 2007.