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WEA Trust Executive Director Al Jacobs explains the Trust's health care
reform plan during a news conference at the State Capitol. He is joined
by Rep. Mark Miller of Monona.
The WEA Trust – Wisconsin’s largest not-for-profit health insurance company – Monday (April 7, 2003) launched The New Wisconsin Idea, a radical plan for reforming Wisconsin’s health care system.
The proposal, which consists of four individual reforms, offers substantial savings for delivering and paying for health care, and provides help for improving the quality of health care, WEA Trust Executive Director Al Jacobs said at a news conference at the State Capitol. The Trust is the state’s second largest group health insurance company and provides health insurance to half of Wisconsin’s teachers and school staff.
“This plan is as dramatic for health care as Governor Robert LaFollette’s ‘Wisconsin Idea’ was for improving the lives of Wisconsin people,” Jacobs said. “The health care cost crisis we are all facing in this state and the nation is far worse than most people realize. There are currently no national or state proposals that will have a meaningful impact on this crisis. Simply put, it will take fundamental reform to provide the foundation on which to build affordable health coverage for the future.
“Our plan has four ideas that represent sweeping but doable reforms that will make affordable health care available to every state resident, and that will make state businesses more competitive by lowering their health care costs,” Jacobs said. “Our plan would create buying and administrative efficiencies that would reduce the cost of delivering health insurance and help control rapidly rising health care and drug costs.”
More important, Jacobs said, the plan will move the state clearly in the direction of open provider competition and evidence-based medicine.
“Health care costs have doubled on average every eight years over the past 40 years, and they will continue to double unless we implement fundamental system reforms. A family health plan that costs $10,000 today may reach $22,000 a year in 10 years. We must act now,” Jacobs said.
The plan’s four platforms include:
“Wisconsin doesn’t have a health insurance crisis, it has a health care cost crisis,” Jacobs said. “So any reform has to do two things at once: improve the efficiency of the health insurance system to reduce administrative waste, and use data to help the medical profession move toward evidence-based medicine so that citizens can purchase health care based on both cost and quality.
“Doing one without doing the other won’t solve any problems – and that’s what makes The New Wisconsin Idea a unique step forward for this state.”
The following PDF files provide background information. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer to open these files:
Posted April 7, 2003