MN GOPers Offer Bill To Insure More Families and Ban Preexisting Condition Exclusions

Saint Paul, Minnesota (April 1, 2014) —  Republicans legislators in the Minnesota House of Representatives today released detailed legislation that would extend health insurance to 489,000 uninsured Minnesotans, and guarantee that Minneostans will never again be denied health coverage because of a preexisting health condition.

“Democrats have put their detailed health care plan out there to be analyzed by Minnesota citizens, so we decided that we should develop our own detailed proposal,” said Minnesota House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt (R-Crown).

republican_alternative_to_obamacare_GingrichThe Democrats’ Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made it illegal for private insurance companies to deny coverage due to pre-existing health conditions, something that impacts many of the 2.3 million Minnesotans who have some type of pre-existing health condition, and others who could develop one in the future.

The ACA also successfully helped 95,000 of Minnesota’s most vulnerable citizens get efficiently covered in Medicaid, including about 12,000 uninsured Minnesotans whose medical expenses were being shifted to insured Minnesotans.  In addition, the ACA covers 35,000 Minnesota young adults, many of whom otherwise would have been uninsured, but now are able to stay on their parents’ health policy until age 26.  Finally, over 150,000 Minnesotans recently enrolled into health insurance plans via the MNsure online insurance selection and comparison tool, in part because the plans offered on MNsure carried the lowest premiums in the nation.

Despite those findings, Republicans gathered at a news conference at the State Capitol today to declare the Democratic effort a “train wreck,” and to release their detailed legislative alternative  They note that their legislation will achieve more results at a fraction of the cost of the ACA.

“We’re proud of our party’s health reform ideas, and have no problem setting our detailed proposal alongside the Democrats’ detailed proposal,” said Daubt.  “In fact, we have already asked for a non-partisan third party analysis of our legislation, so that Minnesotans can see precisely how our bill compares with the ACA in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and affordability.”

In other April 1 news, a large group of boars was reported to be flying through a brutal polar vortex over the frozen southeastern Michigan town of Hell.  The soaring swine seemed to be disoriented by a blinding morning sunrise on the western horizon.

Note:  This satirical post was featured in Politics in Minnesota’s Best of the Blogs.

Learning To Lose With MnSure

Bunyan_woodpeckerIn case you haven’t heard, Republicans hate health insurance exchanges like MnSure. While the conservative Heritage Foundation developed the approach, conservative leaders like Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich and Orrin Hatch endorsed it, and conservative standard bearer Mitt Romney pioneered it, contemporary conservatives have come to despise it since it was adopted by President Obama.

Conservatives now prefer to allow insurance companies to compete across state lines governed by federal regulations, instead of the current system of state-by-state regulation of insurance products.  But there isn’t sufficient political support to enact the conservatives’ preferred interstate competition approach.

I feel my conservative friends’ pain, because my preferred approach also doesn’t have enough political support to become law, and I also don’t love insurance exchanges like MnSure.  I’d much rather have a single payer system — the system that delivers the best care and value in other industrialized nations — than this competitive private sector exchange model.  However, since there wasn’t sufficient political support for my first choice, my fallback preference was to authorize a “public option”—a Medicare-for-All — competing against private options to test which model is more efficient and effective.

But alas, after a long, fair and considered congressional debate, I lost on both my first and second choices.  Now I and all Americans have to accept the private competitive exchange model that prevailed in the democratic arena.

Memo to my Republican friends:  That’s how losing works in a democracy.  You have to accept the outcome of the democratic process, and move on like an adult.

While insurance exchanges like MnSure were far from my preferred option, there are things I like about them.  For the first time, they require products to be directly comparable, so that a lightly informed consumer like me can actually do apples-to-apples shopping, or silver plan-to-silver plan shopping.

That represents a significant improvement that will reshape the marketplace in a somewhat more consumer-friendly way. With private and non-profit insurers required to create directly comparable products, insurers now know that many consumers are going to buy the more affordable apple over the comparatively expensive apple.  That puts consumer demand pressure on insurers to offer the most affordable apple possible, just as airlines have constant demand pressure to offer the most affordable ticket to New York City via online marketplaces like Kayak, Orbitz and Travelocity.

Whether we’re talking about Kayak or MnSure, the widespread availability and use of the Internet makes this kind of comparison shopping possible.  Social media and advertising guru Simon Mainwaring is among those those who have written about how the Internet changes modern marketplaces:

“More than ever before, consumers have the ability to unify their voices and coalesce their buying power to influence corporate behaviors.”

So far, this type of “coalesced buying power” is showing promise.  In Minnesota’s competitive exchange, we are seeing among the lowest premium prices in the nation.  That’s a tribute to Minnesota’s non-profit health insurance companies, the state health care model that Republican Governor Arne Carlson significantly shaped and the exchange model that Republicans developed, supported and pioneered.

In life and in policy making, sometimes we don’t get our first choice, or even our second choice.   Liberals like me certainly didn’t get our first or second choice in the 2010 federal health reform debate.  But that doesn’t mean that some good can’t come from the third choice, if we’re adult enough to give it a chance, instead of working overtime to sabotage it.

So my conservative friends, on the launch day for MnSure, join me in belting out those healing Stephen Stills lyrics:  “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.”

– Loveland

Note:  This post was also featured in Politics in Minnesota’s Best of the Blogs.

Minnesota Health System Needs Obamacare Too

On a weekly basis, Garrison Keillor reminds Minnesotans that we are above average.  But we didn’t need him to tell us that.  We’re a pretty innately smug bunch when it comes to our state.  Call it “Minnesota Exceptionalism.”

We’re especially smug about our health care system.  Therefore, some of us were not all that sure we needed Obamacare’s private health insurance mandate, which is presently the only politically feasible way of improving health insurance coverage and banning pre-existing condition restrictions.

But we do.

It is true that Minnesota is better off than the rest of the nation. Nine percent of Minnesotans lack health insurance coverage, and that’s much better than the nation as a whole, where 16% are uninsured.

We can rest assured that we aren’t suffering nearly as much as many other states, such as Texas (27% uninsured), Mississippi (24% uninsured), Louisiana (22% uninsured), Nevada (22% uninsured), and Oklahoma (22% uninsured). These GOP strongholds are suffering more at the hand of the GOP’s shameless health reform stonewalling than we are.

But let’s not delude our exceptional selves.  Minnesota needs the private insurance mandate too.   After all, using the same kind of health insurance mandate the Supreme Court just upheld, Massachusets has a much better record than Minnesota.  Under ArneCare in Minnesota, we have 9% uninsured, which is better than average.   But under ObamneyCare in Massachusetts, they have only 5% uninsured.

Moreover, we self-congratulatory Minnesotans should never forget that in the shadows of Minnesota’s overall 9% uninsured rate are pockets of much deeper health care despair. For instance, more than a quarter (27%) of low income adult Minnesotans are uninsured. That’s a little bit of Texas in our midst.

No, 9% is not good enough. That’s 463,100 of our Minnesota friends, neighbors, and coworkers who are just one metastasized cell or black ice sheet away from a mountain of medical bills, and the bankruptcy that so often goes with it.

That’s 463,100 Minnesotans delaying medical care until medical care becomes much more expensive, and often much less effective.

That’s 463,100 Minnesotans who obviously don’t stop getting hurt or ill, and therefore are forced to shift their enormous medical expenses to the rest of us, which in turn forces more of us to drop our own coverage.

That’s 463,100 Minnesotans — the population of Rochester, Duluth, St. Cloud, Eagan, Plymouth, Lino Lakes, Willmar and Ramsey, combined.

That can’t be ignored.  Minnesota needs the insurance mandate, and the rest of Obamacare too.  So thank you Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, Don Nickles, Mitt Romney and, now, John Roberts for giving it to us.

– Loveland

Note:  This post also was featured as a “best of the best” on Minnpost’s Blog Cabin feature.