Hatch says health care reform must be in steps

08/11/2006

Radical overhaul is unrealistic, he says

BY BILL SALISBURY
Pioneer Press

Attorney General Mike Hatch says there’s no magic potion for providing universal health care.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor endorsee for governor, unlike many of his fellow DFLers, says it is unrealistic to expect Americans to accept a radical overhaul of the health care system, such as a single-payer or government-run program, to provide coverage for everyone.

Previous attempts at massive change have been “so cataclysmic, it scares people,” Hatch said Wednesday in a speech on health at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

“If you want to change the system, you’ve got to take it inch by inch, foot by foot,” he said. “But as you do it, you’ve got to demonstrate you’re saving, demonstrate you’re broadening coverage.”

Don’t get Hatch wrong. He’s passionate about health care reform. He said it’s what drives him.

He said he thinks the current system is an incredibly expensive, unfair and inefficient way to deliver health care, and he wants to transform it.

But he proposed a piecemeal, incremental approach, starting with small steps to reduce costs.

“The issue isn’t universal health care. The issue is the cost,” he said. And the only way to reach universal coverage is to squeeze costs out of the system and make it more accountable, he said.

He proposed modest steps — he called it “inching along” — to reach that goal. Most of his recommendations come from a policy analysis on health care that he produced early last year. They include:

• Cutting administrative costs of health care providers, especially the multimillion-dollar salaries, stock options and other perks of corporate executives.

“This system is so full of slog, I know I can get” cost savings, he said.

• Adding state-appointed directors to the boards of large, nonprofit health providers to make them more accountable to the public.

• Authorizing the state to make bulk purchases of prescription drugs and make the lower-cost medications available to all Minnesotans.

• Expanding school-based health clinics to reduce costs through preventive care.

• Opening more public mental health clinics. “That’s a lot cheaper than sending people to prison,” he said.

Hatch said he could do all those things without raising taxes. The money, he said, would come from more aggressive auditing of tax cheaters, an expected state budget surplus, and finding savings within the health care system.

His speech was one in a series sponsored by the Humphrey Institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance. Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty spoke at the institute last month, and Independence Party candidate Peter Hutchinson is scheduled to give an address there at 8:30 a.m. today. Two other gubernatorial candidates, DFLer Becky Lourey and Republican Sue Jeffers, are slated to speak later this month.