Walz/Flanagan Administration still haven’t released single payer cost study
As candidates race toward the finish line in the final month of campaigning, health care affordability and fraud have risen to the top of mind for Minnesota voters. Amy Klobuchar’s plan to tinker with existing health care delivery would be made illegal by Peggy Flanagan’s plan to federalize health care and outlaw private health insurance, including the popular Medicare Advantage plans.
Flanagan is promoting “Medicare for All” (M4A) which is a Bernie Sanders initiative she has adopted to fix rising health care costs by entirely socializing the cost of care within a government-run program. The White House pegs that cost as $47 trillion over 2027-2036. Other estimates set the cost at around $30 trillion for a ten-year estimate. In 2023, Minnesota’s progressive left was disappointed to not enact a state version and so had to settle for a cost estimate study of the plan. So where is it?
Minnesota taxpayers paid nearly $3 million for a 10-year cost-benefit analysis of the Minnesota Health Plan. Minnesota Statute, chapter 70, article 16, section 19 ordered the Department of Health to hand deliver the cost estimate on January 15, 2026. The appropriation was $1.815 million in fiscal 2024 and $580,000 in fiscal 2025, with a $580,000 base in fiscal 2026.
Minnesotans forked over $3 million for a cost estimate for PeggyCare and they still have nothing to show for it.
It is now October 7. The Legislative Reference Library still lists mandate 18079 as unreceived. Last month, American Experiment started asking for the report. The only note on file is the one MDH gave months ago: publication delayed “until later in the spring of 2026.” Spring ended. So did the June 2026 contract end date MDH described in its January 2025 RFP answers The department’s study page was updated in late September and still posts no model, no findings, and no accounting of coverage. The only document up is a March 2024 University of Minnesota review of other states’ studies.
Peggy Flanagan has not waited on the numbers. She is the DFL nominee for U.S. Senate, and Medicare for All is a posted priority. On September 21 she told the Star Tribune she did not start the campaign as a supporter, then decided “not nibbling around the edges” was the point: “I think Medicare for All is the way to go.” On September 20 she wrote that Minnesotans “deserve health care, not just health insurance,” and that as senator she will “fight to pass Medicare for All.” Asked in August how to pay for it without massive tax increases, she said care “is already outrageously expensive, and folks are not getting enough for it.”
Amy Klobuchar’s plan looks a lot like something to sooth the headache of an insurance industry lobbyist. It lists reinsurance subsidies to insurance companies, price transparency and an extension of the covid-era subsidies for individual health insurance plans. However, Amy Klobuchar would have a tough time muscling this through the legislature, perhaps getting as much pushback from progressive DSA-aligned members as from Republicans. The DFL legislators will push for PeggyCare, which outlaws private health insurance entirely. If they are in the majority, they will demand it.
If you think that is extreme and cooler heads would prevail, think again. The DFL majorities passed the most sweeping and extreme proposals in the history of the state in 2023 when they governed over slim majorities in the senate and the house with a DFL Governor. They raised taxes while burning through $17.5 billion in surplus tax collections. They outlawed oil, coal, and natural gas for electrical energy production by 2040 (in thirteen years). That wasn’t an inspirational goal, it was a bill and it was signed into law.
In 2011, Minnesota had the most to lose of any state by enacting Obamacare, but we were one of the first states to do it. We led the nation in quality and value of care with some of the lowest numbers of uninsured. We had a program for lower income families to buy care. We had a program for those with preexisting conditions. We led the nation in medical device innovators who stood to be whacked. Senator Klobuchar voted for it anyway took credit for attempts to undo the harm in the years since.
She would sign PeggyCare into law before the ink dried on the bill.