Committee Vote Tuesday on Bill Remedying Wisconsin’s Noncompliance with Part of the Health Care Reform Law

The Assembly Committee on Insurance will hold an executive session Tuesday (Oct. 11) to vote on AB 210, which would put into state law a number of health insurance reforms in the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) – at least on a temporary basis. The bill was introduced by the committee chairman, Rep. Petersen, and is being pushed by insurance companies.

Insurers are concerned that Wisconsin’s failure to comply with the federal law means that consumers will be able to take their grievances to two different independent appeal boards – one at the state level and one at the federal level – and could get conflicting rulings. An article in this morning’s Kaiser Health News says that Wisconsin is one of 16 states that don’t meet new requirements under the federal health law for consumers to appeal health plans’ decisions to a third party, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and it helps explains why insurers are concerned.

Rep. Pedersen plans to offer a substitute amendment Tuesday that addresses a couple of the concerns raised by advocacy groups, while still appeasing conservative legislators who are leery of being involved in any way in appearing to endorse the ACA. For that reason, the substitute amendment retains a slightly amended version of a provision that advocates hoped would be deleted – the section that blocks the new consumers protections being put into state law if the ACA is struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

From the perspective of advocates for health care consumers, the substitute amendment makes at least a couple of small improvements:

• It deletes a provision that would have allowed the Insurance Commissioner to issue emergency rules without a finding of an emergency.
• It precludes establishing a Health Insurance Exchange in Wisconsin without the approval of the legislature. In other words, an Exchange can’t be set up by executive order. (That’s a change that is likely to be supported by liberals and conservatives alike, though for somewhat different reasons.)

It will be interesting to watch the debate on this bill. Insurers will be pushing hard for it because they are worried about inconsistencies between current state and federal law, and because being out of compliance means we will soon have two different systems of independent reviews for consumer complaints. Progressive legislators are likely to have a lukewarm reaction because the bill is such a weak endorsement of the consumer protections in the ACA. Some conservatives will be reluctant to support it for a similar reason -- because it’s an endorsement (of any sort) of portions of the ACA.

We’ll follow the bill with great interest.

Jon Peacock