News

State ponders health care

The state Legislature is beginning to consider plans to offer cheaper health care to residents with the introduction of the Wisconsin Health Care Partnership Plan.

Introduced by state Sen. Russell Decker, D-Schofield, and Rep. Terry Musser, R-Melrose, the plan represents a bipartisan effort to overhaul the health care system. And it is gaining praise from health care officials, as well as many people around the state.

"Our method of paying for health care is broken and needs to be fixed," said Robert Vogelzang, professor of radiology at Northwestern University Medical School.

In addition to two other newly introduced plans — the Wisconsin Health Plan and the Wisconsin Health Security Act — Decker and Musser's Wisconsin Health Care Partnership Plan aims to "drastically lower" the cost of health care, according to Decker.

He added his plan would reduce the cost of health care to $300 per employee per month.

The plan would do this by requiring that all public and private employers remain on one plan, Decker said.

"Basically, our plan sets up one unified pool for providing health care to residents," AFL-CIO President David Newby said. "It's not universal, but it gets pretty close."

Newby also said the plan would reduce the number of uninsured Wisconsin residents from 500,000 to approximately 80,000. He added these remaining residents would still be uninsured because they do not live in a family in which one member is employed, and would therefore not be covered.

The key to this plan, according to Newby, is reducing administrative costs.

Noting that 25 percent of health care costs simply go to the largely bureaucratic nature of the insurance system, Newby said the Wisconsin Health Care Partnership Plan would reduce the amount of influence insurance companies have over negotiating costs for profit.

"Every time an HMO writes a policy, they have to analyze the age structure and prior medical history in order to figure out how much to share in order to make a profit," Newby said. "Our system eliminates a lot of that overhead expense."

Newby and Decker stressed that the plan is different from the recent health care reform to take place in Massachusetts in July 2007, which Newby called "a sham."

"It's not really funded and requires everybody to buy health insurance. Although they do have subsidies, they end when a family has an income of $50,000 a year," he said. "It may sound like a decent income, but if you have to pay the entire amount of health insurance, that's a lot of money."

Additionally, Vogelzang called it a "terrible wrong" that many middle-class workers take jobs simply because it provides health care.

Although he said he prefers a free-market system of health care where consumers have some choice, he commended the efforts of Wisconsin legislators to reduce costs.

"I applaud anybody who has got political muscle to start to say we need to do better for our citizens," Vogelzang said.

He added that Decker's proposal deserves attention because it would give more people access to health care.

Decker said he "doubts" any of the proposals will be discussed by the end of session Thursday; his plan will most likely be taken up in the next session, he added, because it was just recently drafted.