The Oregon State Capitol in Salem. (Photo by Amanda Loman/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Starting in 2026, Oregonians won’t have to worry about unpaid medical bills ruining their credit or car dealers changing loan terms after they’ve driven off the lot.
That’s thanks to two of the new state laws that Gov. Tina Kotek, lawmakers and consumer advocates gathered in Salem to celebrate on Monday. A third measure that also takes effect in 2026 will require online sellers to proactively disclose fees before customers check out.
“No one who’s trying to just do the basics should be dealing with these types of barriers,” Kotek said. “And folks are struggling today. We know that the cost of living is up, people are having a hard time doing their household budgets, so we should do everything we can here in Oregon to protect folks, make things transparent, make things fair and help them avoid unexpected costs.”
The new laws come as Oregon and other states try to step into a void left by the weakened federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Then-President Barack Obama signed a law creating the independent agency in 2010 to protect consumers from deceptive financial practices like those that led to the 2007-08 subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent recession.
As of 2023, the federal bureau was handling an average of 3,000 complaints a day and reported returning $17.5 billion to Americans through canceled debts, monetary compensation, reductions to the principal of a loan and other relief. Shortly before President Donald Trump took office, the bureau finalized a rule to remove medical bills from credit reports of about 15 million Americans.
But the Trump administration reversed that rule. And under Trump’s leadership, new acting director Russ Vought moved quickly to fire roughly 90% of the agency’s 1,700 employees and ordered staff to stop nearly all regulatory activities.
Those changes at the federal level put more pressure and responsibility on states, Kotek told the Capital Chronicle.
“You often hear for some of these industries that they don’t want a 50-state patchwork of protections, but that’s what we’re going back to without the consumer finance agency setting national standards,” she said. “This is going to fall back to the individual states to protect their consumers.”
Kotek signed the three new laws — Senate Bill 430, Senate Bill 605 and House Bill 3178 — earlier this year. Each takes effect next year.
Sen. Wlnsvey Campos, D-Aloha, said Senate Bill 605, the medical debt law, will help Oregon families rebuild after a medical crisis and avoid joining the hundreds of thousands of Americans who declare bankruptcy each year because of medical bills.
“It ensures that an unexpected illness will not become a permanent financial scar,” she said. “This is economic justice in action, standing up for what is right and giving everyday Oregonians a fighting chance.”
Chris Coughlin, federal policy director at the nonprofit Oregon Consumer Justice shared stories from two Oregonians who testified for the measures. Dorothea Smith, who purchased a car from a Hillsboro dealership in 2023 while living near her grandchildren in Colorado, wrote that she signed purchase paperwork under the assumption that the dealer would arrange financing.
But three months later, after Smith had already taken the car to Colorado and paid for insurance, she found out the car financing never went through and the Oregon dealership expected her to either pay in full or give up the car.
“Instead of settling in and spending time with my grandchildren in Colorado, I had to navigate a confusing and unfair purchase process,” she wrote. “Instead of volunteering at my grandson’s school, going to the park, going on play dates at the arcade, and all the special grandma lunch dates, I sat on countless phone calls with the Hillsboro dealership trying to get answers and sort out financing I thought was already finalized.”
Under current law, dealers have 14 days to finalize a loan. House Bill 3178 reduces that to 10 days, requiring dealers to either void the loan or accept a retail installment contract with the same loan terms they negotiated at sale time. It also will require dealers to provide plain-language disclosures to buyers in five different languages.
“For a lot of Oregon households, buying cars is one of their biggest, if not their biggest, purchase,” Kotek said.
While Kotek and Democratic allies celebrated the three new laws as a way to protect Oregonians’ budgets, they’re also moving ahead with a planned transportation package that would raise $4.3 billion over the next 10 years by hiking the state gas tax by 6 cents per gallon, raising the state’s payroll transit tax by about $68 annually for the average Oregonian worker and increasing title and registration fees.
“We have to maintain our roads, and we also have to do all the other things we can to help people manage their costs,” Kotek said.
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