Public Employee Healthcare Pooling Plan

Speaker Dillon's Proposal

The new draft, the latest version of Dillon’s House Bill 5345, would force 1.5 million Michigan working men and women and their employers to buy their health insurance from a new state government‐run health insurance plan the bill would create – unless they could overcome a series of complicated thresholds and almost insurmountable hurdles. Medical bills would be paid by a new fund created in the state Treasury and taxpayers would be forced to bail the fund out if it runs short of money, as has been the case in other states that have tried similar schemes.

The new version preserves the worst features of House Bill 5345 and adds several new layers of reporting requirements, boards, fees and other complications. It presumes that health care costs are driven entirely by plan design, ignoring the real drivers of health care costs – age, health status, chronic conditions and catastrophic illness. The bill creates a vast new health care bureaucracy within state government and institutes a new tax on local governments and school districts to pay for it. Contrary to the Speaker’s claims, the bill will not save the state any money, and, in fact, it will cost taxpayers up to $500 million to start and operate each year, according to an analysis of the original bill completed by Public Policy Associates. www.publicpolicy.com/reports/PublicEmpHlthInsReformProposal.pdf

For a copy of a press release on this latest version, click here.