Big retailers most common employer listed on Medicaid applications

By Julia Shumway | Editor

Multi-billion dollar grocers and retailers including Walmart and Amazon are among the employers Oregonians most commonly list on their applications for Medicaid, senior reporter Alex Baumhardt’s analysis of state data received through a record request shows. It’s a similar list to the companies with the most recipients of federal food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The tax cut and spending megalaw congressional Republicans passed last year will cut SNAP and Medicaid funding while extending corporate and income tax cuts.

“It’s time for corporations working in our communities to step up for our communities,” Alan Dubinsky, a spokesperson for the Service Employees International Union Local 49 that represents 15,000 workers in Oregon and Southwest Washington, told Alex. “Stop gouging the state and provide healthcare for your workers. If Jeff Bezos can afford hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers, he can afford to provide healthcare for the people that built this wealth for him through their labor.”

Also in today's edition:

Controversial animal cruelty initiative won’t be on ballot
Heat in prisons
Crime continues historic decline

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In Oregon, big grocery, retail companies have highest number of employees on Medicaid

By Alex Baumhardt

People shop for groceries at a Walmart store in Ohio. Walmart was the most frequently listed employer on Oregonians' Medicaid forms in 2025. (Photo by Marty Schladen/Ohio Capital Journal)

Multi-billion-dollar grocers and retailers such as Walmart and Amazon were among the most listed employers on Oregonians’ applications for publicly-funded health insurance last year, according to a Capital Chronicle analysis of Oregon Health Authority data.

Oregon initiative that would have banned most killing of animals won’t be on November ballots

By Julia Shumway

Members of the Yakama Nation harvest Pacific lamprey at Wilumpt, or Willamette Falls, near Oregon City on June 24, 2026. The lamprey are an ancient and culturally significant species for many Northwest tribes. Fishing would have been banned under an initiative that failed to gather sufficient signatures to make the November ballot. (Photo by Alex Baumhardt/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

Oregonians won’t vote in November on whether to ban hunting, fishing, livestock farming and animal research after backers of a widely criticized initiative failed to gather enough valid signatures to make the ballot.

As summer heat continues, is Oregon doing enough for people in solitary confinement?

By Shaanth Nanguneri

The entrance of Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon’s only women’s prison. (Photo by Ben Botkin/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

As triple-digit temperatures and heat advisories continue to appear across Oregon, some state prisons and the incarcerated Oregonians they house are going without a key tool to beat the heat: central air conditioning.

Crime continues historic decline as homicide rates approach century lows

By Amanda Watford | Stateline

Crime rates continued falling across a sample of large U.S. cities in the first half of 2026, with homicide rates dropping enough to put the nation on track for another historic low in killings.

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