Gov. Walker pushes for national health care changes on Washington trip
Walker, an independent, joined
The nation's governors converged on
Walker led with a plea for bipartisan cooperation. "Health care is a human issue. It's an American issue that we need to embrace. ... The pendulum swinging back and forth between administrations on health care -- that's got to stop," he said.
The plan includes a list of general ideas that would require broad cooperation to accomplish -- lowering the cost of prescription drugs, offering greater transparency of health costs and combating "anti-competitive behavior, particularly among local hospital systems, pharmacy benefits managers and pharmaceutical companies."
"We're addressing this on a national basis so we don't end up being the victims of something that happens on a national level," Walker said. He commended Sen.
Any moves made by
In talking to congressional
Otherwise, Walker said, the plan will be to sit down with insurance carriers and medical service providers back in
One thing state officials are considering is finding a way to include small businesses in the state's relatively massive health insurance program, to offer greater bargaining power.
It "would allow us to pool state employees with other populations, and the small group market might be one that we look at to put in," said
More than 340,000 Alaskans are covered by state insurance, whether they're employees in
They are considering group negotiating. "So for example, rather than an individual school district or a political subdivision having to negotiate that on their own ... consider negotiating for the 340,000 lives that the state of
But she is cautious. "We recognize that while we have great opportunities to be able to negotiate better prices by pooling together, we also want to make sure that we do it responsibly so we don't accidentally increase costs for everybody else," Davidson said.
But the state is often held up as a model for achieving what others hope to replicate: a "re-insurance" program that helps insurers pay for patients with expensive health problems, so that those costs don't weigh down the system.
While individual market insurance costs rose across the country this year, some premium costs fell more than 20 percent in
"What they did in
Some of what happens will depend on what the Legislature does, said Davidson and Wing-Heier. Bills under consideration include options for increasing cost transparency -- so consumers know what a medical procedure would cost before they have it -- and a potential federal waiver on Medicaid work requirements.
At the end of 2017,
"In 2018 we think it might have lost us about 1,000 people. But relatively speaking it did not have a great impact. We didn't lose 30 percent of our market, which is what you were hearing from some of the statistics."
The greatest shifts to
From
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