WEA Trust Offers Plan to Reform Health Care System
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:
- A centralized purchasing pool for prescription drugs. This
program would reduce drug spending by 15% to 20% by ensuring evidence-based
prescribing and statewide purchasing.
- A statewide claims transaction system that will reduce administrative
waste, collect health care data, foster evidence-based medicine, and
reduce health system costs by tens of millions of dollars.
- A new pricing system for health care that will help consumers
understand what health care providers charge for procedures and what
their insurance plan will pay. “There’s no possible way
consumers can be expected to use health care dollars wisely unless
they and their doctors are equipped with basic cost and coverage information,”
Jacobs said.
- A statewide plan to provide basic preventive health care and
catastrophic care to all residents. “By providing preventive
health care to all, we apply what we know – an ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure,” Jacobs said. In addition, Jacobs noted
that we see a proliferation of heart and other high-tech programs
that are driving up the cost of care and likely reducing its quality.
“We need to develop a centers of excellence system for high-cost
care to both improve the quality and reduce the cost of such care,”
Jacobs said.
“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.
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Posted April 7, 2003