More MinnesotaCare cuts

04/20/2005

Patricia Lopez, Star Tribune
April 20, 2005

Deeper cuts than those proposed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty would throw 2,700 working Minnesota parents off state-subsidized health insurance, under an omnibus health and human services bill that passed a key House committee on Tuesday.

Along with other cuts in the bill, the money saved would help pay for a $65 million wage increase to the state’s nursing home workers in 2006-07.

The bill would bring to 30,000 the total number of Minnesotans who would lose health coverage. Most of those would be adults without children, but the changes made Tuesday would affect adults with children and incomes exceeding approximately $33,000 for a family of four.

“We’re paying workers in nursing homes by kicking other workers off MinnesotaCare,” said Rep. Tom Huntley, DFL-Duluth. “That’s what we’ve come to.”

Republicans said tough choices are needed on behalf of taxpayers and the neediest Minnesotans.

There is a chance the additional cuts would not become part of the final bill, but that depends on passage of the racino bill, which would put slot machines at the Canterbury Park racetrack. The racino would generate an additional $100 million.

Under the Republican-led House’s two-track budget plan, $20 million of the racino revenue would be earmarked for health and human services. Rep. Fran Bradley, R-Rochester, said on Tuesday that he would use a portion of it to restore health care to working parents.

But should the racino proposal fail, Bradley said, the cuts would stand. Minnesota would still provide more generous benefits to able-bodied working adults than other states in the region, he said.

Bradley said that even without the racino money, the bill focuses on the right priorities. Precious resources are targeted, he said, to the disabled, elderly and children and only then to parents of children and to able-bodied childless adults.

Tighter restrictions on the use of emergency rooms, lower eligibility, a 10 percent premium increase for MinnesotaCare and increasing requirements for prior authorization for certain tests will help hold costs down, he said.

“Admittedly, we’ve made some tough choices here,” Bradley said. But even without the racino money, he said, health care spending would increase 15 percent over two years. “We really do a good job for the needy in this bill,” he said, noting that Minnesota would still be spending more on health care for working adults than any other state in the region.

But not everyone saw it that way on Tuesday.

In a letter to Bradley, Kathy Tomlin, director of the office for social justice of Catholic Charities, wrote that “your intentions in this bill seem very clear: to reduce the size of the MinnesotaCare program drastically and permanently at the expense of Minnesotans who have few if any other options for securing affordable health care insurance ... The moral choice would be for you to use every tool at your disposal to prevent these cuts from happening.”

DFLer Huntley said some of the bill’s attempts to contain costs would only increase them. Hospitals would have to pay more for charity care, and costs ultimately would be shifted to privately insured Minnesotans in the form of higher premiums.