Morrison works to insure more Coloradans

DENVER - When Gov. Bill Ritter asked Marcy Morrison to head the Division of Insurance after promising to concentrate on health care reform, the 71-year-old former head of the Consumer Insurance Council was speechless.

Once she considered the position — for which she never applied — she felt she could make a difference.

Now, 5½ months later, the only El Paso County resident appointed by Ritter to head a state division is focusing on two goals. One is carrying out directives of legislators looking for ways to insure more Coloradans; the other is simply to let more people know that the Division of Insurance is there to help them.

Morrison is an old hand at public policy, having served as an El Paso County commissioner, spent an eight-year stint in the Colorado House and most recently been mayor of Manitou Springs.

“My passion for this job is to get information out to the public,” Morrison said in her Denver office. “And frankly, I think we have not done as good a job as we should have over the years. When I was a new legislator, I didn’t even know there was a Division of Insurance.”

Within the Department of Regulatory Agencies, the division serves as a source of information for consumers about insurance, and it fields complaints about insurers’ practices. It had 4,111 complaints open as of last week.

Morrison, who got to know the division as she carried a number of insurance-related bills from 1993 through 2000, is touring the state this summer to introduce people to her work. She also is retooling advisory pamphlets for consumers, and she is giving out the division’s Web address (www.dora.state.co.us/insurance) to anyone who engages her in conversation.

“People want to understand what their rates are and why they have certain coverage, and the more we can explain that to them, the better they understand,” said Morrison’s boss, regulatory agencies director Rico Munn.

Morrison’s talks often turn to the big picture of insurance reform, a task she says both federal and state governments have been slow to embrace.

“We need to have an honest, forthright conversation with the American public about what kind of health insurance we want,” Morrison said.

“Everybody has a different idea about it, but I don’t hear the political will from our leaders to take that on.”

Morrison provides administrative support for the 24 insurance-related measures Ritter signed into law this year — a collection of mostly small changes. Her role will expand next year after the state-appointed 208 Commission offers suggestions for overarching reform, some of which are bound to be complicated and controversial.

The former GOP legislator waded into one debate this year when she testified for House Bill 1355, which barred small-business insurers from taking employees’ claims history and current health into account when calculating rates.

While Republicans complain that the law hurts companies by also eliminating discounts for healthy employees, Morrison sided with Democrats in saying cost hikes for companies with sick workers left fewer people with coverage.

Her decision still leaves some, such as longtime GOP activist and Rep. Larry Liston of Colorado Springs, chafed.

“I know Marcy and I like her and she’s a nice lady,” Liston said. “Her testimony helped the bill pass, but unfortunately, I don’t think she truly knows the ramifications of what it will do to the insurance industry.”

Such are the lines Morrison walks as one of only three Republicans among Ritter’s appointees. She says she looks not for partisan solutions but for those that will expand insurance to as many people as possible.