MINNEAPOLIS, June 11, 2009 - On Tuesday, Democratic leaders in Congress began to release their health care reform proposals. Members of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee released a partially drafted bill, and House leaders released a three-page outline of their reform plan. Here are some of the key points in the proposals and how they align with the MMA’s reform vision as expressed in the Physician’s Plan for a Healthy Minnesota.

Individuals
Individuals would be required to purchase insurance if they could afford it, and waivers and subsidies would be available for hardship cases. The federal government and states would set up insurance exchanges to facilitate buying insurance. Both House and Senate Democrats support subsidies for families with incomes up to $88,000 a year. Both plans would include penalties for individuals who do not purchase insurance.The MMA supports a requirement that all individuals in Minnesota have health care coverage. The MMA’s plan also called for the government to subsidize coverage for those who cannot afford it.

Employers
The House approach includes a proposal to require employers to buy insurance for their employees or pay a penalty. The MMA plan did not propose requiring employees to cover their employees.

Insurers
Insurers would be required to cover people with pre-existing conditions. The MMA’s plan called for guaranteed insurance coverage for all Minnesotans for an essential set of benefits. Insurers would also be prohibited from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

Government option
The House plan would give individuals the option to buy into a government-run plan similar to Medicare. Democratic Senate leaders did not include this provision in their draft plan.. A compromise idea that has been floated would be to create a national insurance cooperative that would be owned by its members and could provide an alternative to insurance offered by for-profit companies. The MMA plan did not address such a proposal.

Paying for it
How the government would pay for reform, estimated to cost more than $1 trillion, is still unknown. One proposal is to tax employer-provider benefits that exceed the value of the basic federal plan offered to government employees, which is about $13,000 a year for a family of four. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this could bring in about $420 billion during the next 10 years.

Timing
Democrats will seek passage of their separate bills by early August with the hope of passing a final compromise bill later in the fall.