This morning, the Washington Post’s article, “Will Wisconsin’s Scott Walker Implement Health-Care Reform?”, noted that of the seven early innovator state grantees, Wisconsin is the only state with a GOP Governor holding onto the money. Oklahoma returned its grant in April, and just this week Kansas Governor Sam Brownback returned $31 million. These early innovator grants are intended to help states develop the Health Insurance Exchanges, a key element of the health care law.
Some conservatives speak dismissively of Exchanges as part of “Obamacare,” and much of the recent discussions of Exchanges seems to have forgotten their original proponents, which included the conservative Heritage Foundation. As a PolitiFact article noted, “On numerous occasions, Heritage scholars wrote approvingly of the exchange system in Massachusetts, known as the Connector.” The PolitiFact article referenced the work of Edmund Haislmaier, a Heritage fellow in health care policy, who wrote in an April 2006 paper about the Massachusetts plan, of the “truly significant and transformative health system changes that the legislation would set in motion.” Haislmaier went on to say:
“this concept of organizing a state’s insurance markets around a central clearinghouse represents a dramatic departure from recent state health insurance reform proposals. States have spent the past 15 years trying to expand health care coverage to small-business employees, with virtually no positive results. The Massachusetts legislation represents a bipartisan commitment to move away from the policies that have largely failed to make progress in covering the uninsured for the past 15 years.”
Though the original Exchanges supported by the Heritage Foundation, including the Massachusetts Connector model, will be implemented somewhat differently in the Affordable Care Act, Heritage and other conservative leaning policy groups have been advocating for similar ideas for years. As PolitiFact reported, Heritage scholar Robert Moffit wrote in an October 2006 paper (“The Rationale for a Statewide Health Insurance Exchange”) that “the best option is a health insurance market exchange.” He said it “would expand coverage and choice” and would represent “a revolutionary change in the health insurance market.”
It is important to note that after leaving the role of Medicaid Director under former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, the current WI Department of Health Services Secretary, Dennis Smith, was a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. We hope and expect that he understands the potential in Health Insurance Exchanges to create a strong market of private insurance plans for individuals and small businesses to shop for health insurance coverage, and for the Exchanges to set in motion what Edmund Haislmaier called “truly significant and transformative health system changes.”
Sara Eskrich and Jon Peacock
