Mark Dayton asks Republicans to approve health care relief by week’s end

Jan. 04--Gov. Mark Dayton kicked off Minnesota's legislative session imploring the newly empowered Republican Legislature to pass immediate relief for Minnesotans hit with massive health insurance increases.

"It's time-urgent," Dayton said Tuesday, the first day of the 2017 session of the Legislature, of his proposal to spend up to $300 million in rebates for the roughly 100,000 Minnesotans facing double-digit premium increase and no federal subsidies on the individual insurance market.

The governor will follow his call to action on health insurance by releasing his plan for statewide borrowing Wednesday and a plan for state tax cuts and credits Thursday. He is following through on a pledge to fight for what he thinks is right, no matter who is in the Legislature.

Although the Democratic-Farmer-Labor governor may want haste on those key issues, Republicans, who took over control of both the House and Senate on Tuesday, predicted a slightly slower journey.

"It's very important to have public hearings, to make sure the bill is heard in public committees," said House Speaker Kurt Daudt, R-Crown. "We're going to pass a bill off the House floor by Thursday of next week."

DIVISIONS OVER HOW FAST

The debate over timing may be only a precursor to what the governor predicted would be a "difficult" session.

On health care, House and Senate Republicans say they want to help Minnesotans struggling with their insurance premiums. But they do not want to approve a rebate plan without some broader changes to the state's health insurance market.

"If it's just relief and there's no sense of any reform, I do not support that. That would be a big mistake," said Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, a Republican from near Nisswa.

How quickly that reform needs to be done is a point of division between House and Senate Republicans.

The Senate GOP is pushing for immediate substantive changes aimed at helping the 2018 health insurance market, while House Republicans favor a more slimmed-down package now and tackling the 2018 measures later this month.

"We're asking for some common-sense measures," said Sen. Michelle Benson, R-Ham Lake and the chair of the Senate committee overseeing health care issues. "That would be very reasonable to have in the first bill."

Daudt, in contrast, said lawmakers need to "triage this and deal with issues that will affect people in 2017, and then maybe in a longer-term bill, pass issues that will affect people for coverage starting Jan. 1 of 2018."

He identified one other measure that he said needed to be passed urgently: a provision to help some people keep their doctors if they're being forced onto a new plan with a different network.

"Even if we can get some sort of premium relief to people, if they don't have any access to health care, if there's nothing close to them that they can afford or (is) in their network, that's a problem," said Rep. Joe Hoppe, R-Chaska and the House's lead negotiator on the issue.

Health insurers say they're open to helping people stay with their doctors -- if the state pays for it.

Dayton backs the slimmest plan: premium relief now, everything else later. His rationale is that anything else will add time as the Jan. 31 end of the open-enrollment period for 2017 nears.

Bigger reforms, the governor said, would have to wait.

"Those can be taken up in due course," Dayton said.

Dayton said he is open to changes to the state's health care system. In October, he admitted that "the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for an increasing number of people."

That utterance, used in Republicans' campaigns, reached the ears of President-elect Donald Trump last year. In a tweet, Trump repeated it Tuesday.

Dayton said that while he has no control over what the president-elect tweets and disagreed with Trump's characterization of health care as "lousy," he stands by his sentiment that health care is out of reach for many and will propose changes to the state's health care system later this month.

FIXES FOR 2018 MARKET NEEDED SOON

They all share a common goal: stabilize an insurance market with too many sick people. Leaders in both parties have backed plans to spread the cost of the sickest Minnesotans more broadly over the state's commercial insurance market, though finalizing the details could prove tricky.

Though the 2018 reforms don't have the same rush as relief for the 2017 market, those measures can't wait very long. Insurance companies will propose 2018 rates this spring -- rates that could be significantly affected by whatever changes the Legislature makes.

Jim Schowalter, president of the Minnesota Council of Health Plans, said insurers need to know what the laws will look like by mid-March -- and said that "if we delay reforms for 2018," many insurers could pull out of the market altogether.

TAX CUTS, BORROWING ON THE DOCKET FOR ALL

The disagreement on the speed of action is a holdover from 2016.

Last year, leaders met repeatedly in hopes of approving health care relief as well as borrowing and tax plans. Nothing came of those talks but animosity.

Dayton plans to push all three issues this week.

Republican leaders say they are open to a borrowing package this year but that tax cuts are a top priority. With the failure to pass any tax relief last year and the expectation that the state will have a $1.4 billion surplus over the next two years, Minnesotans deserve to see their taxes reduced, they say.

"Our priority's going to be on middle-class Minnesotans and making sure that they get relief," Daudt said.

Gazelka, a former member of the Senate's tax committee, said progress on tax breaks should come before agreement on borrowing.

"We want tax relief with a bonding bill," Gazelka said. "I think both of them are good for Minnesota."

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HIGHLIGHTS OF GOV. DAYTON'S PROPOSAL

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