While Democrats and Republicans wrangle for a common solution to the nation’s health care crisis, Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Joel Ario is reminding them that there is common ground in the various proposals.

Joel Ario

With the backdrop of 300,000 Pennsylvanians on the state’s waiting list for adultBasic, the state’s subsidized health insurance program, Ario urged Congress to come together on three sets of principals: end pre-existing condition exclusions, an individual mandate requiring coverage and reasonable subsidies to make care affordable.

“Lost in the din of the recent town hall meetings was the fact that many Pennsylvanians are losing coverage and a much larger number face unfair limitations on coverage and spiraling costs,” Ario said in a statement. “I want to emphasize that there are some common sense solutions that offer a way out of the current morass, where peripheral issues get more play than the consensus reforms that are embedded in every major reform bill now pending.”

Currently, three House committees – Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Health and Labor – have passed their legislation for a full debate, while the Senate Finance Committee remains the lone group in its chamber of Congress to finalize a bill. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee passed their version earlier in the summer.

Regarding the three common elements in all the approved bills, Ario said,  “We cannot cover everyone if insurance companies are free to exclude people with health problems. But it is not practical to require insurance companies to cover everyone if people can jump in and out of coverage as they need it. And it is not fair to require low-income citizens to buy coverage if they cannot afford it.”

Recognizing that Congress still faces one of the biggest obstacles in reform – cost control – Ario urged Capitol Hill to listen to “experts and avoid excess partisanship.”

“There is a golden opportunity to set a new foundation for a health care system in which insurance companies cover the sick as well as the healthy, and all Americans accept personal responsibility for obtaining insurance coverage, much as they already do, in most states, for auto insurance,” he said.

Ario also noted that once these principles are in place, states “should be given the flexibility” to implement reforms, noting the role of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, who support the three common ground measures.

“Our nation is too vast and too varied for one regulatory regime to fit all needs,” Ario said. “Congress should allow states wide latitude to enforce their respective laws when those laws provide greater consumer protections than those afforded by federal law.”