Healthcare in Minnesota

Minnesota’s healthcare system has become an expensive and confusing patchwork of Medicaid, MinnesotaCare, MNsure, and private insurance, each layered with its own bureaucracy, rules, and political influences. Decades of consolidation, cost-shifting, and regulatory add-ons have created a system that works for powerful interests but leaves families and employers struggling. Counties carry major administrative responsibilities, some argue the state underpays on public programs, private insurers raise premiums to compensate, and large health systems use their market power to drive prices higher.

Minnesotans pay more every year, yet the system grows more complex, less transparent, and more vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse built into a structure that has become too large and too unmanageable to properly oversee. This complexity isn’t accidental; it’s the predictable result of both major parties avoiding the hard work of reform while lobbyists and special interests shape the rules to protect their financial position. Consolidation allows hospital systems to charge more for the same services, layers of bureaucracy inflate administrative costs, and programs designed to help Minnesotans have become difficult to navigate and
even harder to afford.

Meanwhile, the sheersize and murkiness of the system create gaps and loopholes where fraud can thrive, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions/billions while politicians trade talking points instead of solutions. Anyone claiming there’s a simple fix is offering a slogan, not a roadmap to real reform. Real reform requires a non-partisan, fact-driven overhaul of how money moves through the system, where inefficiencies exist, and how to restore competition, transparency, and accountability.

Every common-sense option will be on the table, and no lobbyist or party boss should dictate what Minnesotans are allowed to consider. The goal is straightforward: a modern, affordable, outcome-driven healthcare system that finally puts Minnesotans first; not bureaucracy, not special interests, and not political agendas. This is not an overnight process, but one that we must undertake if we are going to start down
the long road of fixing our healthcare system.