Local News
Minnesota’s governor admits Affordable Care Act, “No longer affordable”
Lawmakers calling for a special session to fix it
The first step in fixing a problem is admitting you have one. Minnesota has a health care problem.
“The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for increasing numbers of people,” Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton said Wednesday, calling on Congress to fix the law to address rising costs and market stability.
“I’m very pleased to see the governor has finally acknowledged that the affordable care act and MNSure are not working for Minnesotans,” Winona Rep. Senator Jeremy Miller said.
Few states have embraced the health care law more strongly than Minnesota under Dayton. Lawmakers created a state-run online market exchange called MNSure for people who aren’t covered by employers or public programs to buy individual coverage.
When those policies first went on sale in 2013, Dayton and state officials touted the lowest health insurance rates in the nation.
But, after several years of steadily increasing premiums, top state regulators said this fall that Minnesota’s individual market is in “a state of emergency.”
The state scrambled to stop all seven companies that sell insurance directly to consumers or through MNSure from fleeing for 2017, but the state’s largest insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, is still exiting.
Health care insurance shoppers will see premium increases that range from 50 to 67 percent on their plans for next year.
Minnesota lawmakers are mulling potential fixes to get costs under control and ensure the individual market can survive. While Dayton said that’s worth considering, he said the bulk of the problem lies at the federal level.
“It’s got some serious blemishes right now and serious deficiencies,” he said.
Dayton said he wants to tackle the underlying cost issues of the Affordable Care Act when lawmakers return to St. Paul in January.
Miller says the governor should call a special session well before that.
“There are some things that could be done at the state level and we’ve been pressuring the governor and other democrats to make some of those changes, work together with Republicans,” Miller said. “So far they have not been willing to do so.”
Democrats have defended the act by noting — as Dayton did Wednesday — that the law helped bring down the rates of uninsured.
“We’ve got 20 million more people covered,” Dayton told the Star Tribune. “In Minnesota we’ve got one of the lowest uninsured rates in the country. So it’s been very successful in important ways that I don’t think we want to give up on it.”
Continuing from the Star Tribune: Dayton argued that it’s because Republicans made fixing it impossible. For instance, Dayton said Congress should create a national catastrophic-coverage pool to take pressure off private-market rates; and expand income eligibility for the health care tax credits that enrollees use to help cover their insurance costs.
“But those are things Congress can’t even consider because all Republicans want to do is make political hay out of it,” Dayton said. The ACA “is trapped where it is. It was a start, but it needs to be improved based on experience, which we’ve been unable to do.”