Senate Passes Individual Insurance Plan Lawmakers Hope Bill Helps Lure Insurance Companies Back To State

FOR THE RECORD: March 2, 2000: Errors in story: State Sen. Pat Thibaudeau, D-Seattle, voted in favor of an amendment sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Sid Snyder to exclude small employer groups from certain changes in health insurance coverage. Her position was characterized incorrectly in a Wednesday story. Snyder is from Long Beach. Democratic Sen. Julia Patterson’s name also was misspelled.

For the second time in as many years, the state Senate approved a bipartisan plan it hopes will bring insurance companies back to Washington to provide health coverage for people not on employer plans.

The bill would let insurance companies extend the waiting period for coverage of pre-existing conditions from three to nine months, let carriers screen patients so that the sickest are moved to the state’s more costly high-risk pool and allow similar screening - in some cases - for patients trying to change plans.

The measure now moves to the House, where lawmakers on both sides are disappointed with the Senate’s compromise but are still expected to take action.

The Senate plan comes after health-care committee leaders in the evenly split House were unable to negotiate agreement between two partisan proposals. And it comes after a month of heavy politicking on health care. Two weeks ago, Rep. Linda Evans Parlette, R-Wenatchee, promised to block other health-care bills until the Senate passed an individual insurance bill.

When the Senate finally did Tuesday, Parlette, who has called resurrecting the health-care market her top priority, had little to say. She said she hadn’t had time to read the bill and wasn’t prepared to offer a critique.

“All I know is what I’m looking for: sound insurance principles, choice, a viable insurance market,” she said. “I’m glad we now have a vehicle, because it’s getting close to the time when we’re almost out of time.”

Last week, newspaper advertisements paid for by a committee known as “Health Care for All,” wrongly accused Democrats of trying to create an expensive government-run health-care system.

One day later, Gov. Gary Locke, who held 17 meetings last year with health insurance companies to find a solution, said, “there’s simply no excuse for us not to pass legislation this session.”

The drumbeat comes after 18 months of crisis in the individual insurance market, which provides coverage to about 250,000 people. Beginning in 1998, insurance carriers started pulling out of the state, saying they were losing millions of dollars.

To date, all but nine of the state’s 39 counties have lost all the carriers that once supplied that insurance. Tuesday, most of the debate in the Senate focused on whether the proposal by Sens. Alex Deccio, R-Yakima, and Pat Thibaudeau, D-Seattle, would bring those carriers back.

Deccio, referring to a transcript of a committee hearing where lobbyists for Group Health, Premera and Regence Blue Shield - the three largest carriers - testified, said it would.

“All responded that if (his amended bill) passes, they’ll be back,” Deccio said.

But a cadre of Democrats, worried that the proposal was a “Bill of Rights” for the insurance industry that didn’t do enough to protect consumers, drew different conclusions from the same transcript.

They said the industry representatives’ testimony left too much wiggle room. In response, the Democrats tried to require carriers to return by saying any new law would expire within 18 months if they did not. “It provides the same guarantee for the consumer that the insurance industry is receiving,” said Sen. Julia Patters, D-SeaTac.

That amendment failed.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Sid Snyder, D-Seattle, tried to limit the scope of the measure, much as House Democrats prefer. The Deccio-Thibaudeau proposal also would extend waiting periods for patients covered under small-group plans - typically employers with 50 or fewer workers. That segment of the insurance market, which represents roughly 600,000 patients, is now seeing increasing medical costs, but Snyder argued that problem could be dealt with separately next year after lawmakers have further studied the problems.

With the help of most Republicans, Deccio and Thibaudeau also defeated Snyder’s amendment, arguing that the problems would only get worse if lawmakers waited.

The issue is expected to surface again during debate in the House.