In rural Oregon, U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum talks health care, business and fighting back

Yahoo

23-04-2025

U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum, D-Oregon, speaks with constituents in Silverton. (Photo by Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
SILVERTON— U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum, D-Oregon, had a promise for the crowd of dozens she faced on a coffee shop patio Saturday afternoon: She would go wherever her constituents wanted her to be.
'There can be two of you and I will show up,' Bynum said.
She had done just that earlier in the day, when only three people showed up for a roundtable discussion in Silverton about health care. Residents who attended that discussion or the larger town hall later in the day said they appreciated that their member of Congress showed up at all in a town usually bypassed by elected officials.
'I don't remember the last time that any of our other representatives, (former Democratic Rep. Kurt) Schrader or (former Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-)DeRemer ever came to Silverton,' said Karyssa Dow, a hairstylist, salon owner and 2024 Democratic candidate for state representative. 'We're really small — we're only 10,000 people — but we matter too.'
The three-person roundtable discussed the lapsed contract between Regence BlueCross BlueShield and Salem Health. Teri Butler said Bynum was the first government official she had heard from who was looking into the issue.
'Your survey was the first thing that I had seen of any government entity stepping in and saying, 'We need to look at this,'' Butler said. 'I really appreciate you doing this, because somebody needs to be looking into this. Somebody needs to be asking some of the hard questions.'
Bynum, a first-term Democrat who represents Oregon's 5th Congressional District, expected to talk with a dozen people. But she was unfazed by the low turnout — she recalled holding even smaller town hall meetings during her eight years as a state legislator.
'What's most important is that you show up for them,' Bynum said. 'You get the ball rolling, but you have to plant the seed.'
Her visits this weekend to the Marion County cities of Silverton and Mount Angel are part of what Bynum calls the best part of her job and how she tries to spend most of her time in the district, which crosses the Cascade mountains to include Bend, part of Portland and vast expanses of farmland and mountains in between.
The portion of Marion County that Bynum represents, which stretches north and east of the capital city of Salem, is full of farms growing hops, Christmas trees and fruit orchards. It leads from the Willamette Valley to the western slopes of the Cascade range, and Silverton boasts of being the gateway to Silver Falls, a popular state park where hikers can view 10 different waterfalls in a single 8-mile loop.
It's also one of three counties Bynum lost in 2024 to Republican then-incumbent Chavez-DeRemer, now the nation's labor secretary. Chavez-DeRemer garnered nearly 9,000 more votes than Bynum in Marion County. As Bynum eyes a return to the campaign trail in 2026, narrowing the Republican edge in rural counties could give her a clearer path to reelection.
'I think the further away you live from Portland, the more skeptical you can be of power structures,' Bynum said.
For her, the way to connect with voters in deep-blue Portland, dark-red Linn County and everywhere in between is to focus on the personal. Many of her conversations focus on what constituents want for their kids and grandchildren, like the talk about health care issues.
Regence is Oregon's largest private health insurer, with about 30,000 customers in Marion and Polk counties. Salem Health operates the only hospital in Salem, a hospital in Dallas, urgent care centers, clinics and other medical offices. While the Santiam Hospital & Clinics are still working with Regence, Butler said many of the employees she works with as a human resources manager at Freres Lumber Co. have long used Salem Heath because of its proximity and doctors' specialties.
Now, Butler said, one employee who needs knee surgery and has a pacemaker has to choose between paying out-of-network at Salem Health or driving to Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. And she's worried about her 87-year-old mother, who still drives to Salem for doctor's visits.
Ellen Wilt, a retired federal wildlife biologist who now runs an organic farm in Sublimity with her husband, Greg, said she gave up the doctors who treated her for years and now plans to drive to Portland for care because of the insurance issue.
'The orthopedic surgeons and doctors that I've been working with for years are at Salem Health,' Wilt said. 'The guy that fused my foot bones and the guy who fixed my rotator cuff, I'm not going to them anymore.'
Bynum said she learned from the roundtable and her survey that she needed to highlight the issue for Gov. Tina Kotek and the Oregon Health Authority.
'What I've found over the eight years of being a legislator is that people will default to this statement that says 'I don't have the authority to do that,'' she said. 'I reject that. I take care of my people. I don't care what authority I have or don't have; I need to find somebody with the authority to fix this.'
In Mount Angel, a city of about 3,600 settled by Bavarian immigrants, Bynum and her staff lunched on locally made sausages at the Mount Angel Sausage Company under a patio cover owner Jim Hoke said was funded by the federal Inflation Reduction Act. Hoke and his wife, Robin, operate a restaurant, country store and sausage factory.
Hoke was interested in his similarities with Bynum, who owns four McDonald's restaurants in the Portland area with her husband, Mark.
Hoke described himself as a blue-collar high school dropout who learned management skills on oil fields in Montana before getting into the restaurant business.
In the food industry, Hoke said, he subscribes to basketball star Michael Jordan's famous political quote: 'Republicans buy sneakers, too.'
'We're kind of Switzerland,' he said. 'We don't discuss a lot of politics.'
Back in Silverton after lunch, Bynum met a fired-up crowd ready to protest on the patio of a coffee shop overlooking Silver Creek. The event, billed as 'Brews with Bynum,' was meant to be a set of low-key conversations with Bynum and constituents.
Instead, she stood on the patio, surrounded by dozens of people and fielding pointed questions about why congressional Democrats aren't responding to the Trump administration with the urgency their voters want. They asked why she voted for the Laken Riley Act, a law that requires the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to detain immigrants charged with crimes including theft, assaulting a police officer and drunken driving.
'This is not fighting,' declared one woman who left before the event ended. 'This is not putting your body on the line. This is business as usual.'
Bynum rejected that, saying she and other Democrats are pushing hard against the Trump administration.
'Democrats are fighting in the courts, fighting in the streets and fighting in our community,' Bynum said. 'That's my strategy and that's why I'm here today. I don't know how much you saw Lori (Chavez-)DeRemer. I don't think she ever did an in-person event like this.'
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