Minnesota lawmakers and other officials are spending their summer vacations figuring out how make health care cheaper, more available and more efficient.

It's not quite as relaxing as a trip to the cabin.

Two separate groups - the Health Care Access Commission, made up of legislators, and the Health Care Transformation Task Force, mandated by the Legislature and appointed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty - are taking on the heady task of fixing health care. Both will present their solutions to the 2008 Legislature.

Can they do it?

"I'm guardedly optimistic," said Pete Benner, assistant to the director of the state's largest employee union and a member of the Transformation Task Force.

But Benner, who has served on four high-powered state commissions charged with solving the vexing health care problem, also admits to "congenital optimism.

Like other Minnesotans who have devoted many hours to many committees working to make health care better and more accessible, he has seen some successes - and helped produce some dust-collecting reports.

This year, Benner and the 12 other members of the task force are charged with telling the Legislature and the governor how to:

  • Reduce health care spending by 20 percent by January 2011.

  • Ensure health care for all by 2011.

  • Improve health care quality and safety.

  • Reduce health care disparities.

  • Reduce the rate of chronic illness and administrative costs.

    The group has until February to get it done.

    It's possible, Benner said.

    "There is an energy there that we haven't seen in 15 years," he said. "I think there is a renewed willingness to see where common ground can be found."

    Separately, the legislative commission must report on how the state can get health care coverage for all.

    Subgroups must figure out how to define affordable health care, a task that has vexed health care experts; improve management of chronic conditions and create a way to define a basic health insurance benefit set.

    The commission must complete its work by January.

    Sen. Linda Berglin, DFL-Minneapolis, and Rep. Tom Huntley, DFL-Duluth, commission chairs, said it can be done.

    They held their second commission meeting Wednesday with a standing-room-only crowd in the basement of the State Office Building.

    "There is so much interest in this," said Huntley, who also co-chairs the task force.

    Creating health care access for all is a slightly different challenge in Minnesota than it was in Massachusetts or Vermont, two states that have undertaken comprehensive health care access programs.

    About 93 percent of Minnesotans already have health care coverage, according to the latest available numbers. Massachusetts' goal is to cover 95 percent of its population by 2009, and Vermont hopes to get coverage to 96 percent of its people by 2010.

    Getting insurance to 100 percent of any state's population might be unrealistic, said Lynn Blewett, director of the Health Care Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota.

    "We're probably closer in Minnesota than anywhere in the country," said Julie Brunner, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Health Plans.

    But even with that advantage, the impact of any task force, commission, working group or council will be limited without one crucial factor, said Minnesota's former U.S. Sen. David Durenberger.

    "The commissions can't make anything happen. You have to have a political leader to make it happen," said Durenberger, who has spent his share of summers with groups trying to fix health care.

    Durenberger, who led the Pawlenty-appointed Citizens Forum on Health Care Costs in 2003, said Pawlenty could have had more power to change health care four years ago when he had more time left in his administration.

    "So much of this is a timing thing," said Durenberger.

    But Pawlenty, since his re-election last year, has been talking again about dramatic changes to health care.

    Last year, he called for health care for all eventually and health care for all children as soon as possible. He did not follow up on that call during the 2007 legislative session.

    Instead, he focused on fixing the health care system by bringing more market forces to state-subsidized health care, creating a uniform electronic billing system and pushing electronic medial records.

    "The simple slogan of 'Let's get everybody covered' is good. We like that as a goal in the immediate and long term," Pawlenty said in January. "But we need to first of all recognize that we can't get there overnight and, in addition, underneath the hood the system needs to be improved and fixed."

    Rachel E. Stassen-Berger can be reached at rstassen-berger@pioneerpress.com.