Minnesota State Senator John Marty is the author of the Minnesota Health Plan, a single statewide plan that would cover every Minnesotan for all of their medical needs.

He’s been in the Minnesota Senate since 1987. Throughout his career, Senator Marty has been a strong advocate for public investments in people, in health, education, and employment. Senator Marty co-chaired the Legislative Commission to End Poverty and previously chaired the Minnesota State Health Committee. He now chairs the Senate Finance Committee.

Before we get into John Parker’s and Jim Pounds’s conversation with him, let’s review some facts.

Price WaterhouseCooper, or PWC, has completed interviews and surveys with 27 healthcare plans, which when combined cover over 103 million people who get their insurance through their employer and eight million people who get their insurance through various individual marketplaces. PWC is now projecting that costs for commercial health insurance is going to go up 9% for employers, for those getting their insurance from their employers in 2027. 8.5% for those who are going to be in the individual market.

PwC says this is the highest increase in 17 years. And the Affordable Care Act subsidies were cut in 2025. Minnesotans who lost the subsidy on average are now paying $1,400 more in premiums.
According to the Minnesota Department of Health, the individual in the individual marketplace from insurer, which has six health insurance plans. The rate increases in 2026 spanned seven to 30% depending on the plan that people were enrolled in.

President Trump and Congressional Republicans have cut almost $1 trillion from Medicaid with major cuts starting in 2027. And if that weren’t enough in 2027, for older adults on Medicare, the cap on drugs is going to go up $300.

In the meantime, Medicare For All has increased in popularity year after year, so much so that Data for Progress found last year in polling that an eye popping 78% of Democrats, 71% of independents, and even 49% of Republicans favored it.

Even Trump’s favorite European far right leader, Hungary’s Victor Orban, who was kicked out of office earlier this year, not only supported universal healthcare, but he invested more money in it.
On average, when you compare what the US pays for healthcare compared to other wealthy countries, the US pays double what the French pay, the Swiss pay, Canadians, Belgians, etc.

INTERVIEW WITH MN STATE SENATOR JOHN MARTY

John Parker
Senator Marty, welcome.

MN State Senator John Marty:
Thank you. It’s a real pleasure and honor to be with you. I think that you summarized pretty nicely the problems. Our healthcare system is absolutely totally dysfunctional. I say that knowing that we have some of the best medical professionals, best doctors, nurses, caregivers, some of the best research and science and technology behind it, and yet we have the worst, most dysfunctional system in the world. And that’s been that way for a long time and people are struggling. You gave some of the statistics. And then on top of that, the Trump administration is trying to crush what’s left of the system, taking away healthcare from millions of people and so on. And I guess

I’m tired of when Democrats kind of think, well, we can tinker with the system more because when we’re in power, we can tinker with it. That’s not good enough.

And the way I see it, what I’d like to suggest to Democratic candidates, and the public at large, and the legislature is why don’t we just say, figure out what a health system ought to do.

I put that in writing as about 10 principles of things the healthcare system ought to do – ought to cover everybody without exception. We all need healthcare. Until we die, we need healthcare. Every one of us needs comprehensive healthcare.

It’s not like, well, we cover our fingers and toes as part of your health insurance, but your teeth, that’s different. Got to cover everything. Eyes, hearing, mental health, substance use, every kind of medical thing. A good healthcare system’s going to cover all your medical needs.

It’s going to focus on prevention, not response after the fact, though most of the expenditures are going to always be after the fact, but prevention should be much bigger part of it. You ought to be able to choose who treats you and what kind of care you get. It shouldn’t be determined by some insurance company say, oh, they’re out of network.

It shouldn’t be something where your employer, like in Hobby Lobby, or many other employers, or the insurance company, or the government tells you what kind of care you get.

You and your doctors and medical professionals work it out and you ought to be able to do it. It ought to be affordable to everyone. Everybody ought to pay for some of it, but it ought to be for everyone. And so I put together these 10 principles and what I think any good healthcare system should do.

And then because there were no proposals that came close to meeting any of them, not just all of them, but any of them, I figured, well, why don’t I put together a plan that meets them?

And that’s where we came up with the Minnesota Health Plan. It’s what they call a single payer universal healthcare system designed out of common sense principles, what people ought to expect with the healthcare system and how to do it efficiently and cheaply and everything else. When it builds in the quality we’ve had in terms of training and expertise and facilities and so on.

But I tell people, I don’t need the Minnesota Health Plan. If somebody has another alternative that meets those 10 principles, sign me up. I’m happy to take it. If they think this is the wrong way to go, find another way. But they have to meet those principles – and nobody else has.

And at the national level with Medicare For All, what Pramila Jayapal and Bernie Sanders and others are pushing for, would do that.

But too many times Democrats, well, we don’t want to offend people. We know they hate insurance companies, but we got to be careful. So we’ll give them a choice of insurance companies.

And back in 2016 and 2020 during the presidential campaigns when Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others started talking about Medicare For All, some others didn’t support that because it’s too radical to say we should replace profit seeking insurance companies from your healthcare system.

And they said, “Well, we can’t be for that. So we’ll be for Medicare For All who will choose it.” Meaning you can have these insurance companies and you can do this public one too, and obviously we’ll out-compete them.

Well, it might on a fair system, but first of all, that doesn’t save money. You still got all the insurance plans.
And frankly, Medicare Advantage privatizing Medicare was sold by the business communities, “We can do it cheaper in the private sector.”

But as soon as [Congress passes] the law, they start saying, “You can’t give us that little, you need to give us more money.”

So they rigged the system before it actually started. And then on top of that, they rig it by game playing and cherry-picking and all sorts of other things.

So to me, it’s time we work on that. And that doesn’t mean, oh, it’s all or nothing. We push for covering more people. We push for improving benefits. We push for everything.

But you also are pushing all of it in mind for what we got to do and we got to do it soon—because a quarter of the people in the state can’t afford the care they need.

Jim Pounds:
I remember, Senator, back in, was it 2009, when you said something to the effect, at least what is in my memory is, why don’t we just make health insurance illegal in the state of Minnesota?
Which was the smartest, one of the most succinct and brilliant ideas to say, look, we’ve got this problem. We’ve got the payers and the pharmaceutical people, and even higher education and what they charge to become a doctor, all contributing to the cost of healthcare. And then there’s these insurance companies trying to make a profit on top of it. You’re like, let’s take one quarter of that problem completely away. And it is brilliant. It was brilliant 17 years ago, and it’s still brilliant. And I wish people would see it as clearly as you do.

MN State Senator John Marty:
I hope we’re making progress. First of all, we’ve got lots of support and the public is catching on to this as they get more desperate. And this is not a partisan thing. Some say, oh, that’s a radical leftist thing. No, it’s not.

It’s a conservative thing. It saves money.

It gives people freedom of choice. Not choice of insurance company, not choice of which insurance covers your prescription drugs under Medicare, but it’s a choice of which doctors and hospitals and clinics and treatment you get.

And it saves money. So what we’re trying to do in the next year, I had a bill with Representative Tina Liebling from Rochester. We had a bill and we kicked the insurance companies out of our public programs.
In Minnesota, Medicaid and Minnesota Care cover a full quarter of the state’s population, 1.3 million people.
And [we] would just simply remove the insurance companies from them.

Because right now, if you qualify for Minnesota Care, as soon as you sign up for it, now you pick: Blue Cross or Health Partners or who you want?

We want to get rid of that.

And frankly, this March, the same day I had a hearing in the Senate, Governor Walz [said] he’s ready to go for this now. Got to kick out the insurance plans.

Jim Pounds:
Finally.

MN State Senator John Marty:
It’s time to do this. He’s not going to be Governor, but we need to have, if we have a DFL trifecta, we better do that kind of thing because voters, they’re angry at Republicans, but they think Democrats aren’t offering an alternative and it’s time we do.

John Parker:
I mean, the numbers are there. The data is there. The will of the voters is there. Now we need to see if the will of the legislators is there as well.

Talk to us about how this could be implemented, the Minnesota Health Plan, and what it would look like for Minnesota.

MN State Senator John Marty:
Well, first of all, it’d probably take a couple years to get all the details put together. And second, this is something that makes people say, “Well, it doesn’t have a chance.”

They’ve been saying that for years, but that’s frankly partly because of the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical lobby, the hospital association folks. People who are profiting off the current system, hedge funds. And so they love the current system. They profit big. So that’s a big obstacle.

But right now […] we’re bankrupting our nation very quickly.

The way it would work simply would be, first of all, we set aside money recognizing some people would lose their jobs, insurance company people and all the hassle that all the technical stuff back and forth between doctor’s offices, insurance companies and employers and everything.

Some people would be laid off.

And we think we have an obligation to help people with dislocated worker benefits and retraining. Not every insurance person needs retraining.

Bill McGuire, who was the CEO of UnitedHealth Group until a number of years ago, he’s now an owner of a soccer team and so on. But he was a medical doctor. He wouldn’t have needed retraining if we [passed] the Minnesota Health Plan.

He’s a medical doctor. We couldn’t match his $105 million a year salary, but we wouldn’t need retraining him. And frankly, there are lots of people along the way who are nurses and so on who spend most of their time filling out charts, not for medical purposes, but for billing purposes, insurance purposes and all that.

We got to get rid of that huge chunk of bureaucracy.

Basically what it means for a patient is not much change. The day after Minnesota Health Plan would take effect, you can still go to the doctor, still go with the dentist, still go whoever. And if you didn’t have one, now you’re covered.

You get to choose. And once you make a decision with your doctor, you don’t have to fight for some insurance company to prior approve the thing. Somebody who’s not going to even test you or meet with you or examine your record. [Right now], they’re just looking through some algorithm or maybe an AI system doing that.
Get rid of all that.

You just keep going to doctors and so on. Everybody can. And then for the medical providers, it saves them a lot of time.

A study 10 years ago said that a typical physician practice spent over 15 and a half hours per week on paperwork related to billing and so on. 15 and a half hours per week, and only less than three hours of that per week was the doctor’s time.

[So] that’s 9% or so more time to see patients, spend time with them, and they don’t have to be figuring out what they can order and do because of what they can deal with. They don’t have to fight for prior authorizations and stuff. But between them and their staff with another 12 or 13 hours a week, that’s a lot of time savings and a lot of money savings. So it’s a lot easier for them.

[Right now] a lot of physicians are quitting early. They’re retiring. They love medicine, but they don’t want to fight with this system anymore. So we would [keep] more providers [this] way.

And I’ll suggest an analogy. What would happen if we funded our schools the way we fund schools?

Every day, every teacher would have to calculate how much time he or she spent with every student and supplies and everything else.

And some students have special needs. They need a personal care attendant with them all day.

And they’d send this all to the school billing office. And then they’d send bills out to the parents.
And school is very expensive, so you’d need school insurance to cover it. And employers might even offer it as a benefit to their employees for their kids.

They could have a “ULearn Program” for education insurance and Blue Cross could have theirs and Medica could have theirs.

Think of all the bureaucracy we could start. Would that save money? No, it costs a boatload of more money.

And would it improve education? No, it’d take teachers time, administrator time, parent time, figuring about paying the copays when they should be spending time with their kids.

So nobody would suggest we do that.

And that’s what we’re trying to undo in what we’ve got now.

John Parker:
It also occurs to me [that someone else] who would be saving a lot of time and stress, frankly, are employers who wouldn’t have to deal with health insurance plans and deal with that benefit. Trying to find someone who will offer it and getting the right plan. But hopefully starting in January, we will start to see that debate happening and real legislation moving forward. Senator Marty, this has been such a delight. Thank you so much for coming here.

MN State Senator John Marty:
So glad to join you.

Learn more here: https://sen.johnmarty.org/311-2/. Connect with State Senator Marty: https://www.senate.mn/members/member_bio.html?mem_id=1035.