A DFL Row Over Single-Payer? It Could Happen!
Lori Sturdevant
Star Tribune
July 10, 2010
Just when I was about to pronounce this year's DFL gubernatorial primary campaign a pale, issueless comedown from the party's policy brawls of yore, my phone rang. The caller was Jeremy Drucker, spokesman for Matt Entenza's campaign. He'd noted my posted observation from a Duluth forum about how Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Yvonne Prettner Solon (Mark Dayton's running mate) echoed each other in support of moving Minnesota toward a single-payer health care system...
...Single-payer health care could produce an argument worthy of a DFL primary fight, thought I, and about something that matters, to boot. Health care amounts to about 9 percent of the total state economy -- more if the medical-device and insurance industries are thrown in...
... But unlike those rows of yesteryear, this one is about something central to government and critical to the state's future. So keep talking, candidates, while I put these bugs in voters' ears: It's not possible to fix the state budget without fixing health care. Unless exploding health care costs are checked, they'll eat away at the capacity of state government to do anything else in years not far ahead.