This year’s state legislature that convenes next week will largely focus on budget issues. But business leaders are also alert to new government mandates to provide health insurance and how they are being implemented.
Senator Karen Keiser (D-33) told the Business Examiner’s TV program, South Sound Business Report, that the state’s new insurance exchange is not a new government bureaucracy, though it was funded totally by the federal government.
“The Healthplanfinder is a public-private partnership; it isn’t government employees,” said the long-time chair of the Senate Health and Long-Term Care Committee where the agency was formed. “What we also are creating is essentially a marketplace, not a bureaucracy.”
Keiser noted that the state’s aggressive implementation of healthcare reform has, in effect, become an economic development program for Washington, about $400 million in federal grants for the new exchange, other reform efforts and training grants in related professions. She noted the expansion of Medicaid in January 2014 will be create an estimated 70,000 new healthcare jobs in our state alone.
