Roberta Brown considers herself a member of the “disappearing middle class” — a marketing consultant with a successful small business who nonetheless finds the cost of health care increasingly beyond her reach.
“I don’t know if I could afford it if I had to go out on my own,” said Brown, 57, of Minnetonka. “What is going to become of all of us if we don’t have health insurance?”
Brown is one of 120,000 Minnesotans who rely on MinnesotaCare, the pioneering low-cost health plan created in the early 1990s — a program whose future is now in doubt.
Though it was created with bipartisan support, MinnesotaCare is under fire today from Republican lawmakers, who say it has become obsolete and should be replaced by private insurance. Last year, the Minnesota House voted to scrap the program altogether.
When lawmakers deadlocked over that proposal, the Legislature and DFL Gov. Mark Dayton appointed a task force of 29 health care heavyweights to study MinnesotaCare’s future and other health care challenges facing the state — a group that is now poised to go in quite a different direction.
The task force, which will hold its final meeting Friday in St. Paul, will vote on a proposal to expand MinnesotaCare, adding 41,200 people and raising the eligibility ceiling for incomes to 275 percent of the federal poverty level, up from the current 200 percent.
Advocates say that, despite passage of the Affordable Care Act at the federal level, lower-income Minnesotans still need help to cope with rising premiums and deductibles, which often require consumers to pay thousands of dollars for care before insurance benefits kick in.
“Too many working Minnesota families can’t afford … private health coverage,” said task force member Elizabeth Doyle of TakeAction Minnesota. “This is an opportunity to ensure that working families in the state have access to health care that they can afford.”
It also would help people like the self-employed Brown, whose income can fluctuate above and below the current MinnesotaCare eligibility cap.
