Lori Sturdevant: Business voices are crucial in reform of health care

Minnesota's sesquicentennial must be getting to me. As General Mills communications veep Thomas Forsythe touted the ideas behind the Legislature's health-care reform bills as the sole business representative at a news briefing a few weeks ago, my mind wandered.

"General Mills. ... How fitting."

Flour mills in Minneapolis were just getting established in 1858. But it didn't take long before John S. Pillsbury was governor, Charles A. Pillsbury was the Senate Finance Committee chair, George A. Pillsbury was Minneapolis mayor and William D. Washburn was a U.S. senator.

Washburn cousin and milling partner Dorilus Morrison was also a state senator, and was the first and third Minneapolis mayor. Though he's little-known today, he was huge in this state's business and civic history. (Aside to legacy-minded business leaders: Put your name on your company.)

Washburn Crosby Co. became General Mills in 1928. It acquired the Pillsbury Co. in 2001. But mergers and new names haven't changed the willingness of this enterprise's leaders to exert themselves at the Capitol for Minnesota's benefit -- understandably, as seen through business eyes.

Much the same can be said for any number of other Minnesota companies. The positive impact of civic-minded business leadership on this state's quality of life has been enormous. That's what made the difference in getting the transportation bill passed two months ago.

Business voices are looking just as crucial to the fate of health-care reform in the four weeks remaining in this session.

Forsythe's exertions on behalf of health-care reform evidently have been strenuous. When I caught up with him last week, he was nursing a bad back.

He was also discouraged. Minnesota Majority, a conservative network, is on a tear to rally Republican opposition to the bills Forsythe helped shape -- and to secure a veto by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

The group's website warns that reform as those bills envision it "creates new layers of government bureaucracy, adds thousands of people to taxpayer-subsidized health plans, gives government access to private medical records and intrudes into your personal health care decisions."

It's not so -- or at least, it need not be, Forsythe said. "There's so much misinformation out there."

At the heart of the House and Senate bills is a prize for which this state's employers should fight, he said. The shorthand for it is "payment reform." That means requiring medical providers to go public with their prices and the results their services achieve, so consumers can make informed purchases. It means getting away from paying doctors for seeing 40 patients per day and starting to pay them for keeping people with chronic illnesses out of the hospital.

It could mean actual savings -- or at least a slowdown in today's breakneck rate of health-care inflation. It could be, as another architect of the plan, physician and former Independence Party lieutenant governor candidate Maureen Reed says, the biggest business stimulus package to come along in many a year.

But if business eyes aren't shifting off that prize because of fear-mongering by antigovernment folk, they could easily be diverted by the other tussle that threatens these bills at the Capitol. As approved by the House and Senate, the bills expand eligibility for MinnesotaCare, the subsidized insurance program for the working poor. In so doing, they spend money that the governor wants to use to balance the state budget.

DFL legislators say giving more people access to affordable care cannot be severed from payment reform. That may well be the political reality within their caucuses. What's more, Reed says, more access to affordable coverage would mean more savings for everyone over the long term.

But Forsythe and other business lobbyists say that this year, with this budget crisis and with this much resistance to what the Minnesota Majority crowd calls "welfare-like health programs," payment reform with little or no increase in eligibility for MinnesotaCare may be the best the Legislature can do.

That would be enough "to make the ball roll forward half a turn," Forsythe said. "I'd do a cartwheel." From a guy with a bad back, that's saying a lot.

Lori Sturdevant, an editorial writer and columnist, is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.