By Doug Belden

Pioneer Press

ST. PAUL — The top party leaders in the Minnesota House clashed sharply over MNsure but pledged cooperation on bonding and other issues at a session look-ahead Monday.

House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt said the forum at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs was one of several he and House Speaker Paul Thissen will do in the run-up to the Legislature reconvening Feb. 25. “We actually get along pretty well,” he said, despite their policy disagreements.

The strongest clash Monday was over the state’s new health insurance exchange.

Thissen, a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party member from Minneapolis, said “there’s clearly been problems, significant problems, in the implementation of it” but that the bugs are getting worked out and the system will provide coverage for thousands who hadn’t previously had it.

When Thissen started criticizing proposed GOP alternatives, Daudt, a Republican from Crown, jumped in, saying Minnesotans don’t want a “blame game.”

“The whole philosophy behind this is flawed,” Daudt said of MNsure. Under the state’s old system, he said, about 93 percent of people had coverage. “We scrapped the system that was a leader in the country,” Daudt said, to go to one that’s “riddled with problems.”

But that 7 percent who couldn’t get coverage under the old system represents about half a million people that the state has a moral obligation to help, Thissen said. Until Daudt has a solution for that group, “you ought to stop pointing fingers,” he said.

Asked for an issue each leader would be willing to cooperate with the other on, Daudt said if the bonding bill is kept at about $800 million, it will get Republican support.

DFL Gov. Mark Dayton proposed a $986 bonding bill last month.

Thissen said bonding, transportation funding, the state’s sex-offender program and online voter registration are all areas of possible bipartisan collaboration.

House DFLers want to pass an increased minimum wage, Thissen said, along with a “Women’s Economic Security Act” focusing on pay equity, access to affordable child care and expanding family and sick leave.

Legalizing medical marijuana, which some have raised as a possibility for Minnesota, is “not a priority this year,” Thissen said.

He said he expects an anti-bullying bill to pass. Daudt called it “completely unnecessary.”

Daudt said the proposed $90 million Senate office and parking project north of the Capitol is a classic example of wasteful government spending.

Thissen said lawmakers are looking for ways to reduce the cost of the project, and it has yet to be approved by the House Rules Committee, but he said there will have to be some solution to the space crunch caused by the renovation of the state Capitol. “We need a place to put these senators,” he said.

Daudt said Republicans want to roll back taxes on business-to-business services passed last session under the Democratic majority.

If there is a surplus in the February state budget forecast, Thissen said, “I think there will be an interest” in repealing some of those taxes.

Distributed by MCT Information Services