Two months ago, health-care reform looked as if it could be almost easy for the 2008 Legislature -- deceptively so.
A pair of study panels, working in tandem, had produced strikingly similar recommendations that appeared to have enough bipartisan support to become law. The proposals steered clear of philosophical extremes, in favor of enough regulation to help consumers be smarter health-care shoppers and enough incentives to make the medical system deliver better, more cost-effective care. Cost savings from those measures were to be used in part to make health insurance affordable for more Minnesotans, and thereby drive costs lower still.
Those aren't revolutionary ideas. But analysts say they're sufficient to deliver a 20 percent health-care cost savings -- not just to government, but also to the private sector -- by 2015. No other measure on the docket this year promises as much near-term business stimulus.
That promise, combined with the certainty that costs will keep climbing if the state does not act, attracted broad initial backing. But criticism has persisted from the left, which prefers government-run health insurance for all, and from the right, which favors much less government involvement in every aspect of health care.
Last week, it appeared that the latter group had gotten to Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty. His expressed concerns about a Senate bill modeled after his own panel's proposals looked like a potentially fatal blow to the effort to reign in health-care costs and improve Minnesota's health -- not only for this session, but likely for the rest of Pawlenty's term.
But by week's end, the reform effort was exhibiting encouraging resiliency. Pawlenty was calling his concerns "fixable." The Senate bill was modified to address some critics' objections, and won a bipartisan preliminary vote, 41-22.
The House version, a work in progress, got a news-conference boost from a coalition that included a General Mills vice president, a labor leader, a seniors organization, a nonprofit health-care CEO, and the physician who ran for lieutenant governor on the Independence Party ticket in 2006, Maureen Reed.
Allowing so much consensus to come to naught would be a lawmaking failure Minnesotans would rue for years. It no longer looks easy to achieve major reform this session -- but it still looks imperative.
