Health Care Reform in Minnesota

On April 23, Minnesota enacted complex and far-reaching legislation to reform health care.¹ The goals of the law are to contain costs and ensure that all Minnesotans have affordable insurance for basic outpatient and inpatient health care. Its major provisions reform health insurance practices, establish a state-subsidized, sliding-scale health insurance plan, provide for regional planning of the health care system, support endangered systems of rural health care delivery, decrease the need for defensive medical practices, establish a data base on the provision and outcome of health care, and propose to consolidate the state's health care bureaucracy. Background In 1989 increasing…