Health Insurance Exchange Rejected by Louisiana Senators

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A proposal that would have set up a body of elected and appointed officials to craft the health insurance exchanges that anchor President Barack Obama’s health overhaul has failed to gain traction in the Louisiana Senate.

The Senate Finance Committee decisively rejected Senate Bill 744 in an 8-1 vote.

Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, said she wasn’t pushing the idea as a partisan exercise. But the Times-Picayune reported that the newly-elected chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party didn’t win that argument with a Republican-dominated panel.

With the rejection of Peterson’s bill, Louisiana remains one of a handful of states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, who opposed the Democrat-led health overhaul, has decided the federal government should be left to run the exchange.

The exchanges will launch in January 2014, with private insurance firms offering individual policies to Americans who have not been able to purchase policies on the open market.

Peterson told her colleagues that Louisiana should take ownership of the exchange rather than “wait and see what the federal government dictates to us.” She listed several Republican-led states that are designing their own exchanges

Jindal’s health secretary, Bruce Greenstein, opposed the proposal.

Greenstein said the administration wanted to protect Louisiana taxpayers from the expense, though any exchange would be set up with federal money and then sustained through taxes on the insurance products, just as the Louisiana Insurance Department is already financed.

Greenstein also said there was no point to launch an exchange as the U.S. Supreme Court mulls the constitutionality of the law’s requirement that individuals buy a policy. Peterson replied that her bill would not go into effect until Jan. 1, well after the court’s decision is anticipated.