As Mike Huebsch prepares to begin his second session as Assembly speaker, he sees two priorities ahead for the Legislature: economic development and health-care reform, which he sees as vital to economic development.

Of course, as the man in charge of seeing that the Republican Party maintains or builds on its majority in the Assembly and regains control of the state Senate, Huebsch also will spend quite a bit of time on politics in 2008.
Huebsch recently spoke about the year ahead, and looked back at 2007, a year dominated in the Legislature by the state budget stalemate.

“We’ve got some big challenges coming up,” he said.

Health care was a big issue in the last session, with Huebsch pointing to the Senate’s Healthy Wisconsin state health-care program as one of the chief obstacles to a budget agreement.

“Everyone recognizes that health care is a huge problem in this state and this country, and the Democrats’ solution is to have government take it over,” Huebsch said. “Never before have you seen a greater difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.”

Huebsch expects the Senate to again champion Healthy Wisconsin in the 2008 session. And as much as he disagrees with the approach, Huebsch vowed to bring the Healthy Wisconsin legislation to the Assembly floor for a vote, as long is it wasn’t folded into another bill. He’s confident an “up or down” Assembly vote on Healthy Wisconsin would see the legislation go down.

What Huebsch would rather see is health-care legislation that lets market forces have more influence in health care. A vital part of that involves people becoming more savvy consumers of health care.

With the current system of health insurance, Huebsch said, people have no incentive to shop around or consider alternatives for treatment. When insurance covers everything, people don’t pay much attention to how much their care costs.

Huebsch compares having routine checkups and the like covered by health insurance to having car insurance cover the cost of routine auto maintenance.

“Can you imagine what car insurance would cost if you had it for oil changes and tire changes?” Huebsch asked.

One key to making a transition to a market-drive health-care system, Huebsch said, is to ensure that consumers can easily compare costs of treatment from one clinic or hospital to the next.

“We need to give people choices in health care,” Huebsch said. “We as American consumers can reform the health-care system overnight.”

Huebsch is confident that medical institutions would be happy to have greater clarity when it comes to pricing of services. The trick is to “develop a uniform system to compare apples to apples,” Huebsch said.

In addition to choices, health-care consumers need more control over the money they’re spending, he said. One way to achieve that is through health savings accounts.

The way Huebsch sees it working is people pay for their own medical expenses out of an HSA of, say, $3,000. Insurance would cover the cost of major expenses, but that insurance would be cheaper because the cost of “oil changes” wouldn’t be included.

“Once you have control over that, you’re going to make much better informed decisions,” Huebsch said. “It’s the free-market system.”

Promoting economic development for the state is the other major priority this session for Huebsch. He sees health care — specifically, the possibility that the state will pass Healthy Wisconsin into law — as one barrier to economic expansion.

Aside from that, Huebsch sees plenty of potential for the state encouraging new businesses to start, keeping Wisconsin companies already here and helping them grow and luring existing companies from other states.

A couple weeks ago, Huebsch traveled around the state with Gov. Jim Doyle and was encouraged by his emphasis on economic development.

“We’re singing out of the same hymn book on that,” Huebsch said.

In fact, Doyle this week proposed a new initiative called Accelerate Wisconsin that features a doubling of funding for technology business grants and loans, a venture capital tax credit and a capital gains re-investment initiative that would exclude 100 percent of capital gains taxes on up to $10 million in long-term capital gains re-invested in qualifying Wisconsin businesses.

Doyle also unveiled a companion plan called Innovate Wisconsin that offers incentives for private businesses to focus on research and development.

Huebsch isn’t as optimistic about the chances for economic development initiatives coming out of the state Senate, though.

“I think their economic development plan is indexing the minimum wage,” he said. “The true liberal wing of the Democratic Party has taken over the state Senate. I don’t think it matches up with what the people of the state of Wisconsin believe.”

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