Copyright Star Tribune
Is it time to be afraid yet? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control is being dismantled before our eyes while our federal government is still shut down by a health care funding impasse. I’ve been wondering what we can do in Minnesota to manage. Having practiced medicine here for 40 years, including my residency at Hennepin County Medical Center, I know that federal, state and local government dollars pay most of the health care costs in the United States. For-profit health insurance companies paid less than a third of the $5.3 trillion spent on U.S. health care in 2024. At least $500 billion was the estimated cost of paying people to figure out how much to bill patients, the government and for-profit insurance companies so that they might reimburse for services rendered. That estimate includes paying people to decide what to do when the for-profit payers deny coverage. Despite this, UnitedHealthcare reported $14.4 billion in net profit in 2024. This was after spending millions of dollars on political campaign contributions and paying for more than 40 lobbyists at the Minnesota State Capitol alone. In 2024, the late UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was paid $8.99 million in total compensation. Under our circumstances, I started wondering if a single-payer health insurance plan administered by the state of Minnesota could save us a huge amount of money by getting rid of multimillion-dollar executive compensations, the need to make billions of dollars in profits for shareholders, and the administrative costs for both the payers and the payees. I was shocked and even a little embarrassed to learn that state Sen. John Marty authored such a bill for a Minnesota Health Plan for all Minnesota residents with no deductibles, no copays, and monthly premiums that, like Medicare premiums, are based on net income reported on prior years’ state income tax returns. To my surprise, some form of the Minnesota Health Plan bill has been bouncing around our Legislature for years. If passed, it would create a level playing field where small or rural hospitals and clinics could stay open because they would no longer be saddled by exorbitant administrative costs. It would force all health care professionals to be better because Minnesotans could see whichever provider they choose, not just the ones in their insurance company’s network. Quality health care would cost less money for all Minnesotans. Why did I not know about this Minnesota Health Plan? Why is it that everyone I’ve talked to doesn’t seem to know about it? Could it be that the for-profit insurance companies are paying millions of dollars to keep our legislators from voting for it and to keep us voters from knowing about it? In 2016, when Colorado volunteers gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to put a proposition for something similar on their ballot, for-profit health insurance companies raised $10 million to “educate” Coloradans to vote against it. It lost. I will consider the alternate possibility that our legislators are worried about the loss of corporate tax revenue if UnitedHealthcare were to leave the state. I would certainly hope that our elected officials care more about affordable, high-quality health care for their constituents. This is a time of crisis. Again, our federal government is shut down because of a fight about paying for our overpriced health care. Can we all just be real Minnesotans and unite as one to force our legislators to pass a Minnesota Health Plan to make health care cheaper and better for all of us? I would like to challenge anyone possessing both moral courage and the financial wherewithal to join me in divesting UnitedHealthcare stock into a fund at whatever Minnesota foundation is brave enough to use those dollars to educate everyone in our state that affordable, high-quality health care is possible for all Minnesotans. If we can do that, maybe the Minnesota Health Plan bill will finally get the media coverage that it deserves and, possibly, become our reality. Dr. Vanessa Dayton is recently retired from practice at the University of Minnesota Medical Center-Fairview and Hennepin Healthcare, and is devoting her time to volunteering with Healthcare for All Minnesotans, Physicians for a National Healthplan-Minnesota, Impact Health Vietnam, Health Volunteers Overseas, and the International Clinical Cytometry Society.
