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After a more than $100 million investment to create a Minnesota health insurance exchange, a leading proponent worries insurers will snub it.

The success of health exchanges relies on having good choices for consumers, but state Rep. Joe Atkins, DFL-Inver Grove Heights, said he’s nervous the selection will be lacking if too many insurers stay away.

“If nobody is coming in and shopping in our market because there just aren’t really any products in there to begin with — that’s my biggest fear,” Atkins said last week.

The health exchange in Minnesota reaches a key milestone this week with scheduled votes on legislation in the House on Monday, March 4, and the Senate on Thursday.

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Minnesota’s health insurance exchange — a landmark piece of state legislation — has drawn lobbyists and interest groups attempting to shape the far-reaching policy to the Capitol en masse this session.

Early last week, MinnPost spoke with Kate Johansen, a lobbyist with the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, about the business group’s hopes and concerns regarding the exchange last week.

On Friday, we heard a different take when we sat down with Liz Doyle, associate director at TakeAction Minnesota, a progressive grass-roots group. She offers a consumer advocate’s perspective on the exchange — a key part of the federal health reform law.

Doyle focuses on health care issues for TakeAction and worked as policy director for the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, before joining the organization.

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Michelle Obama shared company with a Minneapolis woman Tuesday, Feb. 12, at the State of the Union address on Capitol Hill.

Because of a chronic health problem, Abby Schanfield, 21, has become something of a spokeswoman in Minnesota for the landmark federal health care legislation that President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010.

As such, Schanfield was one of nearly two dozen people invited to sit with the first lady during Obama’s speech.

Schanfield was born with toxoplasmosis, a disease that requires ongoing treatment such as periodic surgeries to replace a shunt in her brain.

She now has health insurance through her parents’ policy. But if she must buy coverage on her own, she fears it wouldn’t be available on the open market because of pre-existing condition exclusions in many health plans.

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WASHINGTON — Minnesotan Abby Schanfield will sit in the star-studded First Lady’s box at the State of the Union on Tuesday night.

Schanfield is a recent University of Minnesota graduate and a member of TakeAction Minnesota’s healthcare team. She’ll represent young beneficiaries of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act when she sits with Michelle Obama tonight.

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House and Senate lawmakers want to move to the next stage of federal health care reforms without scrapping innovative state programs like MinnesotaCare.

The 20-year-old program, which provides affordable health coverage to lower-income Minnesotans, does not meet all the criteria of the current federal health care reforms. Rather than scrap the program and start again, a bipartisan group of lawmakers have petitioned the Obama administration for a waiver to allow the state to keep MinnesotaCare under the Affordable Care Act.

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Battles over administration of health care marketplace play out in committee

January is generally not the time of year for four-hour committee hearings at the Capitol. But Wednesday’s gathering of the House Commerce and Consumer Protection Finance and Policy Committee nearly reached that dubious mark.

For more than two hours Republicans grilled Rep. Joe Atkins, DFL-Inver Grove Heights, about the details of his bill establishing an online marketplace where individuals and businesses will be able to shop for health insurance. They raised concerns about adequately protecting users’ data, sufficient oversight of the exchange, and the cost of setting up the insurance marketplace. “The money in Washington isn’t free,” said Rep. Kurt Zellers, R-Maple Grove. “That’s still our money.” But ultimately the legislation cleared the committee on a 12-7, party-line vote.

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The fate of a key state program that provides health coverage to low-income Minnesotans appears uncertain as the state begins serious efforts to implement the federal health care reform law.

The program, called MinnesotaCare, provides subsidized insurance to about 130,000 of the state’s working poor. Aspects of the current program make it incompatible with higher standards included in federal health care reform, which many states will race to enact before the 2014 deadline.

Advocates for the poor are concerned that without MinnesotaCare or a similar state solution in place, those served by the program could fall through the cracks once its federal waiver runs out at the end of the year.

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