Making health insurance more affordable, more transparent
Aside from Highway 14, health insurance prices is one of the issues I have heard about most. Before I was elected, Minnesota’s health insurance market was in dire straits. Insurers were dropping out of health insurance exchanges — Blue Cross and PreferredOne simply stopped offering plans on the individual market. Enrollments were capped, people lost coverage, and Minnesota annually experienced the highest premium increases in the country – as much as 67% spikes for some people. At the same time these costs were soaring, deductibles were increasing too.
Working Minnesotans were feeling squeezed by increasing coverage costs.
For the last two years, we have worked hard to get Minnesota’s health insurance market back on track, so more families could afford coverage without having to forego other necessities.
It would be hard for any fair observer to deny the success of our reforms. In 2017, average premium costs stayed mostly the same for the first time in years, and some people even saw their prices drop. It was virtually unprecedented in the Obamacare era.
The marquee reform we implemented was something called reinsurance. Put simply, this program helps pay the most expensive claims for the sickest patients. It eases the stress on everyone else’s premiums because they don’t have to cover those costs.
The program has stabilized the market, reduced rates, and kept insurers in counties where they otherwise would not operate. It has been so successful that even the New York Times wrote about it.
That success will continue next year. According to a recent announcement from the Minnesota Department of Commerce, every insurer is lowering their rates again in 2019. One researcher from Georgetown’s Center for Health Insurance Reforms said she had “yet to see a state report across-the-board decreases as Minnesota has.”
Republicans are also focused on transparency. It is plain common sense that consumers should know precisely how much typical health care procedures will cost. If there is a clinic down the street or across town that will perform a service for cheaper, you should know about it.
Here are some of the ways we accomplished this: we improved a law allowing you to request a “good faith estimate” for any service, to be provided within 10 days. The estimate will tell you what you will pay out of pocket and what insurance will cover. In addition, the provider must disclose any fees or charges you are expected to pay. Finally, we added a requirement that health care providers clearly post the list of their 25 most frequently billed procedures, including list price, average insurance reimbursement, and reimbursement rates from Medicare and Medical Assistance. The list must be posted online as well as in the provider’s office.
Only two short years ago Minnesota’s individual health insurance market was on the brink of collapse. Our reforms have brought it under control, but we know there is still a lot more work left. These changes are just the beginning. When session reconvenes in January, you can bet health insurance costs will again be at the top of our agenda.
This column originally ran in the Owatonna People’s Press.