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State lawmakers await federal lead on reform: Health-care proposals abound, but cost concerns dictate a wait-and-see attitude.
(Pueblo Chieftain, The (CO) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Dec. 31--DENVER -- What the Colorado Legislature will do on health-care reform when its 2009 session begins next week largely depends on what Congress does on health-care reform sometime next year.
As a result, the Legislature likely won't do any meaningful health-care reform anytime soon, state lawmakers say.
The incoming administration for President-elect Barack Obama has promised that the time has come for sweeping health-care reform.
The new president-elect campaigned on that promise, and his pick for Health and Human Services secretary, former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle, told a Denver audience earlier this month he's already on the job. But by the time Congress debates any plan, the 2009 session of the Colorado Legislature will be over, Rep. Tom Massey, R-Poncha Springs, said.
"It might well be late next year before we see real comprehensive health-care reform where we can quantify the cost and know what will come from the feds and what will come from us," Massey said.
Massey has a couple of health-care reform measures that he's planning to introduce when the Legislature meets in January.
"Undoubtedly, anything we do is going to have a cost to the state, even if the feds have a significant change," he said. "I'm afraid that real comprehensive health-care reform will be shelved until we have a better idea about how we would ever recover the costs."
Senate President Peter Groff, D-Denver, said the problem is that states don't know if they should go ahead with their own health-care plans because of uncertainty about what Congress will do.
"The question is, do we want to try to bridge to something that the Obama administration comes up with, or do we want to kind of cross our fingers, move forward with something and hope that it fits with what the new administration will want to do," Groff said.
Incoming House Speaker Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, said that despite the faltering economy and nebulous congressional plans, there still are some things the state can do immediately.
But, Carroll added, a lot of that likely only will focus on ways to save money.
"We have far too many underinsured and uninsured people in the state of Colorado, and we need to take a long, hard look again at how do we provide the most adequate coverage," he said.
"I know there's some folks who want to talk about single-payer, and I'm an advocate of single-payer, but we need to also look at those things that we can do right now to reduce the cost of health care."
Carroll said that effort will focus on preventive care, and expanding access to community- and school-based clinics.
He said having more people utilizing preventive care for those with little to no insurance ultimately will cheapen health-care costs for everyone else.
At the end of January, the Legislature is expecting to receive a report on a measure it approved this year: the Centennial Care Choices Program.
That program was one of several that came out of a special health-care reform commission last year, which eyed several options that ranged from keeping the current system in place to going to a single-payer plan.
Centennial Care was in the middle of that spectrum. It would meld a public health-care plan with private ones and the report is to detail just how that would be done.
Massey expressed doubt, however, that the Legislature would approve going ahead with such an idea in the current state of the economy and uncertainly over how Congress will act, if at all.
Still, he said the report will be helpful because it should offer better details on how the state could change its health-care system by focusing on base-level of care for everyone.
"It will give us a lot of really good information," Massey said. "This will at least quantify the costs. Every insurer is different, whether you're an HMO or a PPO. Everyone has different levels of coverage, and this is going to set a minimum level of coverage that everyone should have. If nothing else, it will give us some outstanding baseline information."
The Legislature's Health Care Reform Committee is planning to introduce some measures when the session begins on Jan. 7, but none calls for sweeping changes.
Massey plans to introduce three of them, including one calling on the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing to study the feasibility of allowing Medicare and Medicaid patients and medical professionals to get and renew their drug prescriptions over a secure connection on the Internet.
Massey said that idea, along with others, are only designed to help the state save money, which would allow it to cover more people.
"We're not going to see anything that costs substantial dollars, and anything in health care that's at all comprehensive has a significant price tag," he said. "So the sad part is, we're all playing this watching and waiting game to see exactly how ambitious we get (nationally) with health-care reform."
To see more of The Pueblo Chieftain, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.chieftain.com.
Copyright (c) 2008, The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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