Rep. Paul Thissen’s campaign for Governor reported raising more than $115,000 in just seven weeks of fundraising in 2008.The report covers the period from November 10, 2008, when Thissen filed his campaign papers, through December 31, 2008.
“I’m humbled by the generosity of Minnesotans, and particularly grateful for their contributions during these difficult economic times,” Thissen said. “Our campaign is proud of this strong start and how it reflects the positive response to the campaign we’ve received all across the state. I’m committed to work hard to continue building on this momentum.”
Thissen’s campaign finance reports were filed February 2, 2009 with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.
“Minnesotans want a new kind of leadership that will focus again on fulfilling the tremendous promise of Minnesota and its people. They understand that we face complex problems, from our aging population to competing in a fast-paced global economy. They want a Governor that will work with them to tackle our state’s challenges with creativity and resolve and that will deliver results for all Minnesotans. I’ve done that in the legislature and will do that as Governor.”
We have built an incredibly strong state-wide campaign.
First of all, it’s built on hard work and energy. We have gone out in 2009 to 83 of our 87 counties, most of them several times, met with thousands of Minnesotans. And you know what? The lesson I take from Massachusetts is you win elections by working hard and bringing a lot of energy to it. That’s what we’ve done, and that’s what we’re going to do.
Second is, it’s built on a simple message. And that is: our job is to rebuild Minnesota and its economy. And we have to do it in a way that works for middle-class families.
It’s built on the idea that what happens inside the Capitol, what happens over there, doesn’t matter as much as what happens in real people’s lives. And we’ve got to get away from the political gamesmanship, whether it’s within our own party, or whether it’s within our state government. And I’m committed to doing that.
And the last thing is we’ve got to understand that politics as usual won’t cut it anymore. We have built a campaign that is about bringing new ideas — rising to the task of meeting the challenges of this state.
Smart leadership. Smart new leadership. That’s what I have to offer you. And I’d really appreciate your support.
BUDGET SOLUTIONS
I think we all agree that jobs is the first job of the next governor. But I think it’s important that it’s not just any job, but good paying jobs that a family can live on. Because you know what, the way we have to rebuild this economy is to get away from what we’ve been doing for 15 years and focus in on the economies of middle-class families. And letting them succeed. Key to that is a good-paying job.
The second thing — and this is the key I think to solving our budget crisis. We do have to address taxes, we do have to address getting people back to work, but we have to get health care costs under control. They are going up 20 percent. They’re squeezing out our ability to invest in anything else.
If you’re conerned about college tuition, look at the slope of increase in health care costs in our state budget, and the slope of decrease in our investment in higher education. They’re identical but in opposite directions. That’s what we have to get after.
The last thing, which I think we really have to do if we want to do anything, is restore trust in our government. The public doesn’t trust government to do things. And that is opening up government, making it more transparent, moving decisions to the local level, and making sure people are getting engaged.
And that is really up to all of us.
HOW TO GROW
As we get our budget back under control, the places that I would invest our money are early childhood, higher education and our transportation infrastructure, because that is the future of our prosperity in this state.
But two other things we really need to think about. The first is there’s a lot of benefit we can get by incorporating our colleges and our universities more — closely integrated with the rest of our communities. You know I was just speaking with someone earlier here who was saying that the graduates of the urban design classes in this university serve 90% of the cities in this state. Those are the kind of stories we’ve got to get out there. Because there’s a connection between our institutions and the larger community and we need a governor who understands that and is going to connect that more.
The second thing we need to do is we’ve got to stop the brain drain from this state. One way to do that is to model a program in Maine that says that if you go to school in Minnesota, and graduate, and stay here in Minnesota, you’re going to get a tax credit against repaying your tuition. That keeps people here in Minnesota, especially in greater Minnesota. And that’s about –[TIME]. Thank you.
A PLAN FOR REVENUE
As I’ve gone around the state, everywhere the number one issue that people talk about are increasing property taxes and what that’s meaning for their schools and for their cities. We need to move away from reliance on property taxes and move back to a fair state-level tax. And I think that is a winning issue for Democrats next year because people are incredibly frustrated. But that’s the first place to go.
We need to look at the income tax, and I think if you ask Minnesotans: Is it better for someone making $300,000 to pay maybe $300 a year more, as opposed to taking a hundred bucks out of someone’s pocket who’s living on $1200 a month? I think most Minnesotans would say yes, that’s the direction we need to go.
The second thing we need to do is get people back to work, But the third thing we need to do and I can’t say this enough, is we do need to get health care costs under control. It’s a third of our budget today, in 20 years it’s going to be two-thirds if we don’t do anything about. And think about what that means for your ability to invest in your schools, or in this college, or in public safety. We need to change that around. And we can do it — not by the way the governor did, throwing people off of health care — but paying smarter for health care. And there’s no one in this race [TIME] that knows more about that than I do.
GETTING RESULTS
Experience in the tough partisan environment at the Capitol, I think, is a really important qualification for the next Governor. Because it is tough, and it is partisan.
But I’ve only been in the legislature seven years. I’ve been in private practice before that, and I’ve actually continued my law practice while I’ve served in the legislature. I haven’t made a career out of politics.
And so coming into that atmosphere, particularly as a member of the minority for my first years, was an eye-opening experience. Because that’s not how things are done in the private sector — people figure things out. I got a lot done as a member of the minority. It’s one of the greatest blessings I had, coming in, not being a member of the majority. Because you learn to work across the aisle.
I want to share one story with you. Representative Seifert, who’s likely to be the governor’s candidate on the Republican side, has made a career out of welfare-bashing. And would get up on the House floor, year after year, making these arguments. Last year I said, -I’m going to give him a hearing, in committee, let the light of fact shine on what he’s talking about. When we did that his arguments fell apart, except for a few, and I actually had to change my mind on a few things. And we passed those things.
Focusing on the facts, allowing transparency and openness, that’s how you get stuff done. And that’s the kind of leader I want to be for you.
PLAYING TO WIN
I’m State Representative Paul Thissen. And I’m running for Governor because I think that our party, and our state, has been playing not to lose for too long. And I think it’s time we start playing to win.
And as an example, you know there’s are 80,000 kids in this state that don’t have health care coverage tonight. And I think that’s absolutely wrong, as I’m sure most of you do.
So last year, despite the fact that there was a lot of legislative fear over the budget deficit, a hyper-partisan environment, a just-say-no governor, I stood up and said -We have a moral obligation in Minnesota to make sure every child can see a doctor or nurse when they need to.
And because I stood up, we passed a law that means tonight 20,000 more kids have health care coverage.
You know we have a lot farther to go, and I’m committed to making sure we get all the way there. But I think it’s that kind of decisive leadership that we need in this state. A clear vision, tested in the partisan environment over at the State Capitol, and with a record of delivering results and not just excuses.
That’s the kind of governor we need to lead us out of this crisis we’re in. That’s the kind of candidate that we need to win in November. And that’s what I want to offer to all of you.
Minnesota taxpayers purchase health care coverage for 666,000 people, or about one in eight Minnesotans. The cost of care per person — medications, hospitals, technology and providers — has been increasing. And during bad times, like the present, the number needing help is also increasing.
The result puts Minnesota in a budgetary vice. It is a serious problem without an obvious solution.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty, in his budget released last week, proposed a remedy that many will consider harsh. He wants to restrict eligibility for the state’s working-poor health insurance program to children, cut payments to hospitals and providers for their services and reduce the array of benefits that are offered. The impact falls heaviest on low-earning adults whose employers do not provide insurance.
Pawlenty, a Republican in his second term, said last week what he has been saying since he took office in 2003, and what a state report highlighted as far back as 1994: that spending on state health care programs is unsustainable and threatens to crowd out all other programs. He said last week, as he has since 2003, that he does not support tax hikes and that the state must live within its reduced means.
Despite the state’s commitment to insuring those who need it, a 2007 U.S. Census Report estimated the number of Minnesotans without health insurance at 439,000. Some Democratic-Farmer-Labor legislators want to give people more help with health care costs.
Rep. Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, a candidate for Pawlenty’s job next year, has argued that unemployed workers should be covered. He and others are also sponsoring a bill to make sure all Minnesota children are covered.
Both of these observations are true: Health care expenditures are unsustainable, and people will need more help, not less, during the present crisis. This makes health care spending the place where Minnesota’s budget battle must be joined. It’s where the real needs of citizens meet the real limits of government. Working this out will require both sides to change — one side to admit that compassion has its limits and the other to consider the need for more resources — and both to consider rearranging spending priorities.
It also means wading into the details of the three big programs:
Medical Assistance, health care for the poor, aka Medicaid. Costs shared with federal government. Covers about 527,000 people who are very poor, disabled or elderly; also pays for elderly residents of nursing homes who have exhausted their resources. State costs have increased from $1.3 billion in 1999 to nearly $3 billion this year; the average number of eligible recipients during that period has grown from 370,000 to 527,000.
MinnesotaCare, a mostly state-funded program designed for employed people without access to affordable private health insurance. Funded by premiums paid by recipients, a dedicated tax on hospitals and health care providers and federal funds. Averaged about 114,000 eligible recipients this year, far below the peak of 154,000 before the last major budget crisis in 2003. Current annual cost to the state is $304 million, held down by a limit on hospital costs for adults.
Pawlenty is proposing restricting the program to children, a major change. He wants to separate the Health Care Access Fund — containing the premiums and dedicated taxes — from the MinnesotaCare program. The dedicated fund, which has been running a healthy surplus, would be moved to the general fund under Pawlenty’s plan, depriving MinnesotaCare of a secure funding source.
General Assistance Medical Care, a state-funded program for poor adults without children who don’t qualify for Medical Assistance or MinnesotaCare. It serves about 28,000 people at an annual cost of $263 million. Its enrollment has been relatively stable for the last decade but costs have doubled.
Pawlenty’s plan also calls for eliminating coverage for dental, chiropractic, podiatry and rehabilitative services for some programs. He also wants to reduce the amount the state pays to hospitals, providers and pharmacies for their services.
The same bad economy that has reduced revenue coming in to pay for health care will increase demand for these programs as more people lose jobs and coverage. That makes it important to know exactly what we’re buying now, who would be left out under these proposed cuts and how to balance the budget in the best way possible.
The solution, we think, will emerge not from campaign slogans but through hard, line-by-line study of these programs and the hard realities of the budget. To make the best of a very difficult situation, all involved will have to temper their biases, challenge each other’s assumptions, and work together.
The prescription card that Becky Weinhandl uses at Walgreens to get discounts on generic drugs identifies the Maplewood woman as Peanut, which is actually her 11-year-old dog’s name.
It’s no misprint. The drug plan covers both Weinhandls and a cat named Biggie. Weinhandl — Becky, that is — joined Peanut on the family plan of the Walgreens prescription club to save money when she was laid off from her job at Regions Hospital in October.
Effectively, in the eyes of the plan, she’s her dog’s dependent. “It’s ridiculous,” Weinhandl shrugs.
Joining her pets on a drug plan wasn’t Weinhandl’s only big adjustment when unemployment benefits replaced her Regions paycheck last fall: her health insurance premium for single coverage went from $74 a month to $578.
Weinhandl opted to take her chances, joining about 400,000 people in the state who don’t have health insurance.
Laid-off workers can purchase health insurance through their former employer under a federal law called the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, or Cobra. But they have to pick up the entire premium. In Weinhandl’s case, that added up to 35 percent of her unemployment check.
“Cobra is worthless if you can’t afford it,” Weinhandl said.
Minnesota’s unemployment rate climbed to a 25-year high of 6.9 percent at the end of 2008 and it’s likely to head higher in the months ahead, meaning a growing number of workers are bumping into the Cobra conundrum.
Laid-off workers are either dropping insurance altogether or opting for stripped down coverage through a private insurer. If they have a health condition that makes insurance unaffordable, they try to stay on Cobra for the allotted 18 months even though it sometimes eats away 80 percent to 90 percent of their jobless benefits.
State lawmakers this session are considering proposals to help laid-off workers afford health insurance, but it comes as the state wrestles with a projected $4.8 billion budget deficit.
“The affordability of Cobra is a huge policy issue for the state of Minnesota and the nation,” said Lynn Gruber, president of the Minnesota Comprehensive Health Association, which has seen an uptick in applicants who have passed on Cobra.
When workers lose their jobs and consider Cobra — and the full premium and administrative fees that come with it — for many it’s the first time they’ve seen how much their employer was subsidizing their coverage.
“For the first time they are seeing the real bill,” said Sam Gibbs, a senior vice president with eHealthInsurance.com, a health insurance brokerage based in Mountain View, Calif. “It’s a real shocker for folks,”
That’s exactly what it was for Eric Olson. After he lost his job at a business incentive company at the end of October, he found out that insurance premiums for his family of six would come to $1,250 per month.
“I don’t understand how anyone on unemployment can afford Cobra, there’s just no way,” said the 39-year-old from Shoreview. His bill was jarring, so he found a plan in the private market with coverage that wasn’t as rich as his old plan but was adequate.
Olson isn’t even sure how much he was paying for insurance while working — somewhere between $400 per month to $600 for family coverage, he estimates.
“I guess, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying too much attention to what I was paying. But I knew I was paying a big chunk of my paycheck to health insurance and it was going up each year. It was a growing sense of frustration.”
Unemployment only goes so far and many people are concluding they can’t afford the bite out of a check meant to cover living expenses.
Cobra eats up, on average, 84 percent of unemployment for family coverage, according to a national survey by Families USA, a national consumer advocacy group. In Minnesota, Cobra payments of $1,070 for family coverage adds up to 70 percent of unemployment benefits, on average, the group found. For single coverage, the monthly average premium is $375, or 24 percent of jobless benefits.
Chuck Bille, who has leukemia, was laid off from his sales and marketing job in September. He figured he had to suck it up and pay the monthly premium for family coverage, which runs $1,450 monthly, three times what he paid for the coverage while employed.
Private policies would cover him, but not for anything associated with his disease. His Cobra premium is now 84 percent of his monthly unemployment insurance.
“The job market is a little bit tough to deal with right now,” said Bille, 61, of White Bear Lake. “I can’t not have my kids insured and my wife can’t be without insurance and I don’t want to be without insurance. If something did happen, if I got pneumonia and ended up in the hospital with further complications then the option is bankruptcy — if the hospital will even let me in without insurance.”
On the private market, people like Bille with medical conditions are often shut out.
Many access health care through the Minnesota Comprehensive Health Association, a state-supported plan for people who are turned down by the commercial insurance market because of their medical conditions. Over a quarter of the new enrollees in 2008 are people who can’t afford Cobra. That’s up from 14.5 percent in the previous year.
Workforce Solutions, a Ramsey County job training program for laid-off workers, which operates at a workforce center in North St. Paul, wanted to know more about the choices people make when faced with Cobra premiums. The agency has launched a survey of 375 laid-off workers to find out.
“So many of employment guidance counselors have been noting this in last six to nine months — that more and more of their clients were going without health coverage, and it becomes another major stressor in looking for a job,” said Jim Zentner, a planner who is conducting the survey.
The study has responses from about half the workers so far, with 68 percent of those eligible for Cobra indicating they turned it down. Close to 40 percent said they dropped health care coverage altogether.
To remedy the problem of joblessness and expensive health care in the short-term, state legislators are considering a bill that would waive a requirement that people be uninsured for four months before they can sign up for MinnesotaCare, the state’s plan to insure the working poor.
Income eligibility guidelines would be waived. People receiving unemployment would be able to access MinnesotaCare for up to 4 1/2 months of coverage. The bill also waives the premium during that time.
The changes would be phased out in 2011. They are meant to provide a bridge for people who lose their job until they find some other kind of health care coverage, said Rep. Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, the bill’s author. “In a time of crisis, we just want to make access to health insurance as immediate to people as possible.”
Gov. Tim Pawlenty likely won’t be too receptive. Last week, he proposed eliminating health care coverage for 84,000 adults to help the state erase a projected $4.8 billion budget deficit. Calls to Pawlenty’s office were not returned.
Under the federal stimulus package passed by the U.S. House last week, subsidies would pay for 65 percent of the Cobra premiums of laid-off workers for a year. Thissen and other state lawmakers believe this approach would be ineffective.
Meanwhile, those who are rolling the dice on coverage say they realize they are taking a big financial risk.
Weinhandl, the laid-off Regions worker, holds a bachelor’s degree in management information systems. With more than six years in at Regions, she was laid off from a job training doctors and nurses on an electronic medical records system. With her income pared to $419 a week in unemployment insurance, the healthy 37-year-old declined health care coverage.
She said she is more careful on icy spots to prevent a fall that could turn into a sprain with the potential to wipe her out financially. When she caught a cold recently, she worried.
“At the time it was not ‘what if I get hit by bus’ but ‘what if my cold turns into an ear infection?’ ” she said. “Even something innocuous could become a problem.”
Rep. Paul Thissen’s campaign for Governor reported raising more than $115,000 in just seven weeks of fundraising in 2008. The report covers the period from November 10, 2008, when Thissen filed his campaign papers, through December 31, 2008.
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