nothin Amann: Let Arnold Grab The Headlines | New Haven Independent

Amann: Let Arnold Grab The Headlines

Amann%201.jpgState House Speaker Jim Amann, addressing a business crowd in New Haven, lowered expectations that Connecticut would follow states like California in trying to pass universal health care this year. He said he’d rather do it right than compete for headlines.

However Amann did guarantee that within two months the legislature will pass a plan to cover all 71,000 uninsured children in Connecticut, 66 percent of whom are Latino.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week made his state — which has 16.25 times more uninsured people than Connecticut — the latest to put forward a universal plan. California has an estimated 6.5 million uninsured. Schwarzenegger vowed to pass a universal plan in this year’s legislative session, following on the heels of Massachusetts.

Activists and many Democrats are pushing to do the same here in the legislature in coming months. But Amann, arguably the most powerful Democrat in the legislature, is skeptical a universal plan will pass this year. So he told hundreds of businesspeople gathered Wednesday morning in Yale Law School’s dining hall for the annual regional legislative breakfast of the Greater New Haven.

We may be able to do that. But I think it will take a few years to get this thing done right. It’s going to be done in pieces,” Amann told the crowd.

A solid universal health care plan will cut health-care costs, eliminate waste in the system, include personal responsibility for the insured, guarantee true quality care for everyone, Amann said. It will also cost significant state money, Amann said, despite what Gov. Jodi Rell said in unveiling her own recent proposal to rely mostly on managed-care companies to carry out a universal plan.

Plans like Massachusetts’ and California’s do some of that, but not all of it, Amann said. He wants to see Connecticut’s plan address all those pieces rather than to deliver a half-baked universal” plan in 2007.

I would love to be speaker of the house and have an announcement like Schwarzenegger and said, I have solved this,’” Amann said after the Wednesday morning event. To do this in one year is giving false hopes to the citizens. I think it’s going to take two to three years to have a solid plan.”

Reaching Immigrant Kids

On the other hand, Amann said, the legislature will pass a plan by some time in February that will cover the state’s 71,000 uninsured children. HUSKY, the plan for working families’ uninsured children, already largely works well, he said. The problem is reaching more people who aren’t signed up, a remarkable two-thirds of whom are Latino.

There will not be one child left without insurance by the end of this session,” Amann declared.

To meet that goal, he said, the legislature will boost programs that identify uninsured kids at their schools and sign them up there; do the same thing in hospital emergency rooms; make sure forms are all bilingual; and give more support to community-based health clinics, where many of the uninsured now end up looking for care.

Medicaid Consensus

The Chamber breakfast — which featured Republican and Democratic legislative leaders — revealed another promising bipartisan consensus on a first step toward universal care: upping Medicaid reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals for seeing poor families.

Doctors, who are small businesses if you think about it, have not gotten an increase in Medicaid [rates] since the 1980s,” noted New Haven State Sen. Toni Harp. Your employees would not sit back and not get a raise for 20 years…. Medicaid has to pay its fair share.”
Len%20Fasano.jpgA conservative Republican seated beside Harp, North Haven State Sen. Len Fasano (pictured), agreed with her. Fasano requested a seat on the public health committee this session, he said, to take part in crafting a universal health care solution.

Because the state has gone so long without raising Medicaid reimbursement rates — in effect cutting doctors’ pay, given inflation—fewer and fewer doctors will see Medicaid patients. New Haven Medicaid patients speak of having to travel as far as Storrs to find a dentist for their children.

Fasano also spoke of the need to raise Medicaid rates in order to ensure better quality care. Because of the low rates, sometimes doctors are rushing through procedures” right now.

Harp introduced a third new promising idea into the mix. She said she’s intrigued” by a call by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities to have the state assume responsibility for cities’ and towns’ municipal health plans. By building a larger buying pool for insurance, the state would presumably be able to bargain for lower premiums.

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