Heallth care on deck
The issue returns to St. Paul
With the 2009 legislative session half spent, it was beginning to appear that year two of a promised multiyear effort to make quality health care more available and affordable in Minnesota would be a bust. Not so, said legislative leaders and backers of the reform strategy that began in 2008. The leaders of the 2008 health care reform coalition assembled Monday to announce that, with the sour economy making their project more important than ever, they intend to ask the Legislature to enact another culture-changing health care bill this year.
The 2008 effort produced a watered-down bill that was likely to produce about half of the 20 percent cost savings the bipartisan reform coalition sought. It ran into opposition over payment reform -- the idea that health care provider payments should be structured to provide an incentive to keep a population as healthy as possible. Today's payment structure too often serves as an incentive to perform as many procedures as possible, leading to needlessly higher costs and, often, poorer medical outcomes, the coalition says.
The coalition believes that the recession is wearing down some of the resistance to the measures they propose. Health care providers who resented a larger role for government in directing the way medicine is practiced are becoming more open to measures that reduce costs without resorting to rationing services. Rationing could well be the eventual alternative, state Sen. Linda Berglin indicated Monday, if the reform coalition's efforts at efficiency and improved incentives don't succeed in bringing costs under control.
LORI STURDEVANT
HEADS UP, IT'S PENNY
He's talking policy and politics
Former DFL congressman Tim Penny made the Capitol news rounds Monday to call attention to his latest civic project. He and two former Minnesota Republican members of Congress, Mark Kennedy and Bill Frenzel, are among the founding board of directors of the new Economic Club of Minnesota.
Modeled on similarly named clubs in other American cities, the Minnesota group aims to host monthly luncheon speeches by experts on global trade and business success. Launched earlier this year, its next meeting, March 26 at the Minneapolis Club, will feature remarks on the federal bank bailout by Minneapolis Federal Reserve boss Gary Stern.
Penny, the 2002 Independence Party candidate for governor, talked a little politics along the way. He vowed that the Independence Party will field a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, but voiced no interest in being that candidate himself. He also allowed that the IP supports a change in state law that would allow the IP and another party to endorse the same candidate, and have that candidate's name appear on both parties' primary ballots. That "fusion" ballot law functions well in New York state, and would seem politically useful in Minnesota as well.
LORI STURDEVANT
about the writer
As a “special government employee,” he must abide by conflict-of-interest laws and the Emoluments Clause.