Someday, Minnesota Republicans may offer real solutions to improving access to health care. Unfortunately, that day is not today. Instead, Republican legislators offered up a stupendously useless bill that would allow people to save their own money to pay for health care expenses. It sounds an awful lot like health savings accounts, which w0rk great if your health care needs amount to little more than a few Tylenol and an annual physical. They are less helpful for people with chronic health issues. Republicans emphasize that it’s a private-market alternative to the Affordable Care Act’s icky quasi-socialism. The fact that it does nothing to help the ten percent of Minnesotans who are uninsured afford health care is apparently beside the point.
Republicans are probably going to continue proposing non-solutions like this until the Supreme Court rules on the ACA’s constitutionality. Assuming the law is upheld, their stalling is only going to make it more difficult for Minnesota to effectively implement health care reform. And perhaps that’s the real point of sham legislation like this.
