Former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle and Bill Frist are hoping to achieve at the state level what federal lawmakers weren’t able to do: bipartisan health reform.
“We realize that the bulk of the work has to be done at the state level,” Daschle told POLITICO. “We want to work in a constructive way to ensure all the tremendous challenges, including the creation of the exchanges and the availability of the new insurance possibilities for millions of Americans, can be addressed in a way that will assist the states and will advance our efforts at providing good health care for all Americans.”
The Bipartisan Policy Center plans to announce today that it will lead a group of former governors from both parties with hopes of coming up with creative and effective ways to implement the health care reform law.
Much of the reform law has to be implemented at the state level: States will be responsible for expanding the Medicaid program, reviewing some insurance rate changes and creating web-based exchanges where consumers will buy health insurance, among other tasks.
The project comes along just as Congressional Republicans start to try to repeal the legislation. A vote in the House to repeal the whole law is expected to pass this week, but Senate Democrats have pledged to block it.
And the states aren’t immune to the volatile politics of health care reform, either. Several states are now considering legislation to try to block the legislation or blunt its effects.
“The only way [health reform] will work is if it’s bipartisan or even nonpartisan,” Daschle said. “We’ve been encouraged by the level of participation by almost every state” in spite of the political and legal challenges to the law. “There are obligations in the law that have to be met.”
The project, which will be led by Daschle and Frist, a Republican physician and former Senate majority leader, is the most-high profile effort yet to push the states to come together. Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland will also lead the group. The list of other former governors working on the project hasn’t been finalized yet.
Daschle says the group will judge success on whether it can come up with constructive models to help guide the states through implementing the law, how the states receive the ideas and whether they help implementation move forward.
One of the most promising areas of agreement could be the state health insurance exchanges, said Sheila Burke, co-director of the health project at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a faculty member of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Each state will have to establish a web-based portal where consumers can buy insurance – similar to travel sites such as Orbitz or Expedia. Other potential areas are insurance rate review, cost controls and quality improvement.
“There are areas where even people who disagree with the fundamentals of the Obama legislation believe there are reforms that ought to be made,” Burke told POLITICO.
They’re going to start where there are seeds of cooperation but are likely to avoid the most divisive areas of the law.
“Our view is to try to begin where the conversations can in fact take place …. We’re not going to take on the individual mandate, to be perfectly honest,” she said.
Last year, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a bipartisan blueprint for health reform at the federal level.
© 2011 Capitol News
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