Tuesday night, the state government held a meeting at the Cody Library on the Wyoming government’s effort to set up a health insurance exchange.
I left that meeting and drove into a snow storm so thick I couldn’t see the road, so I stopped. Later, the moon was out but snow continued to fall, producing an eerie atmosphere of Wyoming crags and hills half hidden by blowing snow.
That was my second whiteout of the evening.
Earlier in Cody, Elaine Harvey (R-Lovell), chair of the House Labor, Health and Social Services Committee, and Elizabeth Hoy, Gov. Mead’s health policy adviser, lead the Health Insurance Exchange (Exchange) meeting. Both are on the governor’s Wyoming Health Insurance Exchange Steering Committee, which is planning Wyoming’s response to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, a.k.a. Obamacare).
The committee was founded in December 2010 by governor Dave Freudenthal, and Gov. Mead re-appointed it. According to Harvey an Exchange is a web site that makes purchasing and comparing health insurance products easy. They can be for profit, or public (read: government). An example of a public option is the Wyoming Business Council, “run by the people who know the business.” Using the Business Council as an example did Harvey’s case no favors!
An Exchange, she said, should be completely self-funding. But this is a fudge. Later remarks qualified this to mean self-funding after the initial setup cost. “Self-funding” to me means the income covers the startup costs as well as the operational costs.
Another fudge is Harvey’s “good cop, bad cop” scare tactic: if we don’t set up an Exchange, the mean, nasty feds will do it for us, and we’re against that! Except the feds have shot themselves in the foot: there are no federal subsidies for customers of such an exchange. And that makes the bad cop a paper tiger.
When asked about efforts to expand the pool of insurance available to Wyoming residents, Harvey mentioned legislation enacted in 2010 to have the insurance commissioner investigate interstate compacts for that purpose. Commissioner Ken Vines produced no results for a year, whereupon Harvey’s Labor committee called him on the carpet and asked for an explanation. Apparently following Vines, Harvey believes that trading insurance across state lines via the compacts would require harmonizing state’s insurance laws, a task that reminds one of King Augeas’ stables.
What Harvey didn’t mention is that Georgia has already cleaned those stables out. Last year Georgia allowed any insurance company with a legal presence in Georgia to sell health insurance plans in Georgia that they sell in other states.
Yeah, a snow storm just might be a good metaphor for this whole health care reform thing.
