Health-care solution: It's Basic

The state Legislature opened this new session in the usual way: back-patting, pledge-making and head-scratching over how to bring health care to the state's uninsured.

Lawmakers can get their start with the Basic Health Plan. It's funded largely by tobacco taxes, a move voters approved back in 2001 with the passage of I-773. Not long after, with some 130,000 people on the rolls, the state found itself in a deficit. Lawmakers cut 30,000 of them from Basic Health and put the millions in tobacco money toward other needs.

Now that the state is again in the black, it's time to restore Basic Health funding and keep more people in the pink.

Just last week, a panel appointed by Gov. Christine Gregoire said every person in Washington state should have access to affordable and high-quality health care within five years.

Lawmakers are looking everywhere for solutions. They've got one with Basic Health. They just need to invest in it.

All Basic Health enrollees live on incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level. Most have jobs, but their employers can't, or won't, provide health coverage. (Think Wal-Mart.)

The program is hardly a handout. People are responsible for a monthly premium and a co-pay at the time of service.

The benefits go beyond money. Research shows that parents who are insured are more likely to monitor their own health and schedule doctor appointments for their kids.

Basic Health has been lauded as a national model by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation's largest philanthropy devoted to improving health and health care.

It's one answer to a problem that continues to grow. Right now, 593,000 people in the state are uninsured.

Community health-care officials say 20,000 people should be added to the Basic Health rolls, which are presently capped at 106,000. They also want Basic Health's numbers expanded further, as the state had promised before the deficit hit.

"We are hoping that the question that voters have been asking since 2001: 'Whatever happened to that expansion ... ?' gets answered," said Rebecca Kavoussi, director of Public Policy for the Community Health Network of Washington. The network's clinics served 200,000 uninsured people last year in places such as the Sea Mar Community Health Center in Seattle.

Kavoussi hopes the Legislature looks at the growing need for basic insurance among adults, puts back the money diverted from Basic Health, "and makes it right."

There are all kinds of proposals for how to nurse the problem of the state's uninsured. One would allow parents to keep their children on their health plans until age 25. Another would combine state employees, private individuals and the working poor into a huge pool to negotiate for insurance discounts.

While lawmakers sort through those options, they need to remember one already in place. Basic Health.

It's Basic Math. Do it.

Starting this week, Nicole Brodeur's column will appear on Tuesday and Friday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com

And don't forget the lollipops.