09 May Protecting and promoting health care in Minnesota
By Greg Dattilo, CEBS and Dave Racer, MLitt
The Minnesota Legislature is at this time proposing an audacious and sweeping reform to how health care is delivered and paid for in our state. Many of the provisions of this new attempt to overhaul health care are problematic, primarily in how much power is ceded to state government.
This is not the first time our health system has been threatened by increased state regulation.
Working hard on alternatives
Late in 1989 the Minnesota legislature passed an ambitious health care reform that would have essentially put the government in charge of it all. The challenges were similar to today – rising prices, premium increases, and concerns about access. The media called it a health care crisis.
The 1989 legislature responded by passing a form of a single-payer, government-run health care system. They sent it to DFL Governor Rudy Perpich for his signature, but he vetoed the bill. This sent the legislature into a tizzy from which emerged a bipartisan group of legislators who pounded out a more palatable reform.
In 1992, the two of us teamed up and then, building and working with a coalition of people and groups, brought pressure on legislators to modify their overreach as they tried to fashion new legislation. The coalition included benefits consultants, employers, medical providers, and a host of others. This combined effort resulted in the passage of a more rational health care reform effort, which then served us quite well until the federal government passed the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
Since 2014, when the Affordable Care Act’s insurance provisions became effective, the cost of insurance has increased by multiples. Today, the annual premium for employer family coverage exceeds $22,000 a year. Clearly, there is work to be done.
But SF 2995, the new Minnesota health care bill that is close to being passed, cedes power over individual health care and payment through a variety of law changes – some plain to see and others a likely result of the new laws – to the State of Minnesota. These changes threaten to destroy proven insurance methods and interrupts the emergence of new plans that are reducing cost for employees and employers.
All these years, as government grows larger, DCI along with scores of other consultants, insurance companies, and administrators, have created and continue to create new forms of coverage that will provide access to quality, comprehensive care at similar to reduced cost as today. We are still doing this, as we react to the challenges threatening the private marketplace (more on this later).
We are confident and remain hopeful that during the next 18 months, as new state agencies move the new government-run plans toward the marketplace, a new coalition of employers, consultants, providers, and everyday citizens will once again educate elected officials, turning them away from their centralized medicine plans. We will work together for solutions that build, instead, a patient-friendly, affordable health care system giving access to high quality care.
It will take ongoing education of legislators and the regulators they are establishing. But we can do it again as we have done before. When we come out on the other side of this, we might find ourselves with a far better system delivered to us in the private health care marketplace. We are committed to this.
