Witnesses representing hundreds of Idaho employers asked a legislative task force Tuesday to create a state-run health insurance exchange.
They stood before the Health Care Task Force at the Capitol, and just one person, the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s Wayne Hoffman, protested any kind of exchange whatsoever.
The proposed exchange would be a marketplace where all Idahoans could comparison shop for health insurance and buy it. Some low-income Idahoans would use federal subsidies to buy coverage there.
Gov. Butch Otter has been pushing a state-run exchange and has accepted federal money to develop it, even while doing battle with the 2010 law Otter calls Obamacare that requires exchanges across the country.
If Idaho doesn’t build its own exchange by 2013, the law requires the federal government to do it instead — and Otter doesn’t like that idea. Some Republican legislators don’t want the state to take the exchange money.
Twelve groups pitched their wish lists for the exchange at Tuesday’s listening session.
SOME HIGHLIGHTS
• Corey Surber, Saint Alphonsus Health System’s director of advocacy and community benefit, advocated a ratings system so people can judge what’s good and bad in a health plan.
• Scott Leavitt, legislative chair and past president of the Idaho Association of Health Underwriters, which represents insurance agents, said the consumer shopping mechanism should be “more of a web-based portal.” But the Idaho Chamber Alliance, made up of local chambers of commerce, wants more human interaction and less Internet.
• Hoffman said a state exchange would not be free of federal control. He said the exchange requirement may not survive if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the law, and suggested the state delay acting to create one. “The state cannot create an exchange that is autonomous and independent of federal regulations,” he said.
MORE PEOPLE TO BE COVERED
At the same time the exchanges take effect, the law will raise the income threshold so that more people are eligible for Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for poor and disabled people. Nobody knows yet how the Medicaid expansion or the health exchanges will be paid for.
The Idaho Primary Care Association guesses about 14,000 now-uninsured patients at Idaho’s 13 community health centers will get insurance through Medicaid and 35,000 will get it through the exchange.
The state should require all insurance plans to cover care at the centers, said Executive Director Denise Chuckovich.
WHAT’S NEXT?
The task force will start examining exchange legislation over the next few months.
Audrey Dutton: 377-6448
