The political discussion in Kansas may be about repealing and replacing the health reform law. But most of the talk at a two-day meeting here that wrapped up Thursday was about how to make it work.
More than 250 physicians, consumer advocates, service providers, educators and state association directors attended the conference sponsored by the Sunflower Foundation to listen to detailed explanations of the law, question experts about how it will be implemented and compare notes with one another.
Susan Sherry, deputy director of Community Catalyst, a Boston, Mass.-based nonprofit organization that advocates for consumers, said the new purchasing exchange will be critical to making reform work. She said it should be designed in a transparent decision-making process to serve the needs of consumers and to avoid conflicts of interest with insurers and providers.
“One of the things the exchanges have to do is contract with health plans, so I’m not sure it’s a great idea to have health plans (involved in the governance of) the exchange,” Sherry said. “They are going to have to potentially bargain with provider groups, too. So, I would say you want objective people who don’t have financial interests in the decisions the exchange makes.”
Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger said the state is in “the early stages” of planning its exchange, which under the law is to be operational in 2014 and through which tens of thousands of uninsured Kansans are expected to obtain private health insurance with the help of federal subsidies.
The department recently received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to start planning the exchange. It requires Praeger to appoint an advisory group and to set up committees to make key decisions about how to structure the exchange. But Praeger, a Republican who is running unopposed for re-election, said she doesn’t want to make threshold decisions about how to proceed that might have to be revisited during the transition to a new governor.
“We’re wanting to move ahead as much as we can to get ready without creating problems for ourselves in January and February,” she said Thursday during a panel discussion.
Polls indicate that U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, the Republican nominee for governor, is likely to defeat Democrat state Sen. Tom Holland on Tuesday. Brownback, who opposed the health reform legislation in Congress, has said he will continue to work against it if elected governor.
“We will do what is required of the state of Kansas, but we’re going to fight it the whole way,” Brownback said at a recent news conference.
Brownback and his lieutenant governor running mate, state Sen. Jeff Colyer, an Overland Park plastic surgeon, say that the reform law is too expensive and gives the federal government too much control over the health care system.
They have called for the law to be “repealed and replaced.”
Revere America, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative group announced today that it had collected 1 million signatures nationwide on a petition for the law’s repeal.
Sherry said she believes that critics of the law are wrong when they call it a “government takeover” of health care.
“It’s not factually accurate,” she said. “People are going to be given (government) subsidies to buy private insurance. It’s hard to see in my mind how that is a partisan issue. It’s just plain old people in Kansas need some help and this is an opportunity to get it for them.”
Currently, about 347,000 Kansans don’t have health insurance. It’s estimated that about 90 percent of them will qualify either for the expanded Medicaid program or for federal subsidies to help them purchase private insurance through the exchange.