Minnesota Democratic Governor Mark Dayton said Wednesday that the Affordable Care Act is “no longer affordable” after strongly supporting the law just a few years ago.
Dayton’s comments came while taking questions about Minnesota’s health insurance marketplace, where individual plans are facing double-digit increases after all insurers threatened to leave the healthcare marketplace entirely by 2017, WCCO reported.
“The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for increasing numbers of people,” Dayton said, calling on Congress to fix the law to address rising costs and market stability.
Gov. Dayton joins the ranks of Democrats to criticize Obamacare, such as former President Bill Clinton, who said last week that Obamacare was “the craziest thing in the world,” then backtracked and said that there just needs to be fixes to address gaps in coverage.
Under Gov. Dayton, Minnesota has embraced the healthcare law, creating a state-run healthcare exchange for individuals not covered by their employers or by government programs to buy health insurance.
When the exchange went live in 2013, Gov. Dayton said the state had some of the lowest health insurance rates in the nation.
After seven years of increasing premiums, state regulators have said that the marketplace is in “a state of emergency.”
The state scrambled to stop all seven insurers from leaving the exchanges and settled on a compromise that would increase premiums on health insurance plans from 50 to 67 percent next year.
Minnesota lawmakers are considering several fixes to the law to control costs and ensure the individual market survives.
Gov. Dayton says that regardless of the fixes, the bulk of the problem lies at the federal level.
“It’s got some serious blemishes right now and serious deficiencies,” he said.
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