Barnett unveils plan for all Kansans to have affordable health care
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Emporia Sen. Jim Barnett, the Republican candidate in the governor’s race, proposed a plan Tuesday to give all Kansans access to affordable health care by 2010.
The centerpiece of Barnett’s five-point plan is the “Kansas Insurance Connector,” a marketplace for employee health insurance where companies and individuals could buy health insurance with pre-tax dollars. All payments would be made to the connector and a policy could be transferred from job to job without penalty.
Barnett said in an interview this morning that he had no plans to adopt the more punitive measures of the Massachusetts plan, such as penalizing individuals who can afford private insurance but fail to purchase it.
“I have never seen any data that a mandate solves any problem with health-care costs,” he said.
He did choose to emulate another part of the Massachusetts system by proposing a low-cost basic plan that would be available through the connector. The plan would be available to Kansans between the ages of 19 and 40, a key demographic among the state’s uninsured.
Kansas currently has about 300,000 residents who have no health insurance, a little more than one out of every 10 people in the state.
The connector would be regulated by the state insurance department, but would not itself be a governmental entity. At worst, Barnett said, it would be “quasi-government.”
“I want government to be out of it as much as possible,” Barnett said.
Although Barnett said the plan could be funded out of existing state funds, he did not attach a price tag to most of it, including the connector.
“We already spend more money on health care than any other country in the world and we still have problems,” he said. “We have to roll up our sleeves and get at the nuts and bolts of it.
The only two points of the plan that did have a suggested dollar figure were proposals to double funding for the state’s “safety net” primary-care clinics and to do the same for the state’s anti-smoking and childhood obesity efforts. Both receive between $1 million and $2 million from the state now, Barnett said.
Increasing funding for the clinics would pack an extra punch, Barnett said, since it would bring in additional federal funding as well. He added that the smoking prevention effort could be funded through money from the tobacco settlement.
Another point of Barnett’s plan would give Kansans online access to cost and quality information for any health-care provider in the state. Some of that is already provided on the Kansas Foundation for Medical Care’s Web site, he said, but the database could be made more complete.
The final part of Barnett’s plan aims to drive down the cost of malpractice lawsuits by limiting the attorney’s share of the damages. Under the proposal, an attorney could claim no more than 25 percent of an award up to $500,000, no more than 20 percent of the next half-million, and no more than 15 percent of any damages beyond that.