Initiative Seen As Answer To Health Care Law

While debate rages over the fate of Washington’s landmark health care reform law, Dave Mortenson is quietly pushing what he predicted Monday will be the final answer: a statewide vote on the law.

“Our citizen initiative is starting to look like where the action will be given the divergence of opinion in the Legislature over health care,” said Mortenson, a former top aide to House Republicans and now head of the initiative campaign to largely repeal the 1993 law.

Republicans, in the House majority for the first time in 12 years, want the Democratic Senate to agree to repeal most of the law. They’re fighting an uphill battle. The law, which passed the Legislature when Democrats ruled both chambers, is similar to President Clinton’s “managed competition” proposal killed by the last Congress.

The state law is intended to provide affordable health care to all by mid-1999. The law already has been crippled due to congressional failure to give states the power to require employers help pay for insurance.

Senate Democrats are signaling their willingness to greatly revise the law, but not to the extent pushed by the business- and insurance industrybacked House.

And the Senate is balking at a provision of HB1046 to send the issue to voters via a referendum in November to get around Gov. Mike Lowry, a staunch backer of the health reform law.

Enter Mortenson and citizen Initiative 649, which would do the same thing as the House bill.

The campaign to gather the 181,667 valid signatures by July 7 needed to get the initiative on the November ballot is just gearing up, Mortenson said. The campaign, relying on business, some labor groups and the insurance industry, expects to raise from $150,000 to $200,000 to get the measure on the ballot, he said.

Among other things, the initiative would abolish the five-member commission set up to oversee and enforce the law; lift a cap on insurance premium increases; and abolish government-regulated health cooperatives; and abolish a minimum benefits package that all insurers would have to offer.

The initiative would expand the state’s nearly decade-old subsidized health insurance program for the working poor, and would ban the insurance industry from denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.