GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – During this week’s Extraordinary Session the State Senate did not pass a bill that would require health insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, leaving many questions asked about the future of healthcare in Wisconsin.
Democrat State Senator John Erpenbach says passing the bill would have meant pre-existing conditions would be covered, but says that is not the end of the story and that is why it was voted down.
“You can’t cover pre-existing conditions without making sure that there are no lifetime or annual caps,” he said. “We could have passed that bill, and you would have thought that your pre-existing conditions would have been covered, and they would have, however, your premiums and your copays would have been astronomical.”
He says that would have caused premiums to skyrocket and would have been more costly than people imagined.
“There are certain things that absolutely needed to be fixed within that to try to keep premiums down, but just blowing it out of the water does not fix the problem, it actually makes the problem worse.”
Erpenbach says Obamacare is still a work in progress.
“Obamacare was the beginning, it wasn’t the end it was a place to start. We had the tools in Wisconsin to make it better and shape it to what Wisconsinites need and we never did that.”
All of the Democrats and two Republicans voted against the measure.
The Legislature passed a bill that prevents the state from withdrawing from the federal lawsuit that seeks to have the Affordable Care Act declared unconstitutional.
Erpenbach made his comments on WTAQ’s John Muir Show Thursday.
