Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Maine's Failed Health Reforms

Dirigo Care Tanks

By Greg Scandlen

Categories: Insurance Regulation, Medicaid

Maine has recently joined the growing list of failed state reforms. As with other faillures, the Dirigo Care program was shoved down the throats of a bewildered legislature by an egotistical governor who promised Nirvana. You would think people would learn from experience, but a recent report sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Academy Health and conducted by the Mathematica research company shows what a dismal failure it has been.

Of course, they don’t put it that way since these organizations are partly responsible for creating the program in the first place. No, they say things like, “DirigoChoice has faced a number of implementation challenges,” and the “eventual impact on the state’s rate of uninsured cannot yet be determined,” and “its early experiences are not indicative of future success.”

But look behind the spin and the report is a devastating examination of a program that was poorly conceived and doomed to fail from the beginning – as many of us had predicted. It finds: 1. After 20 months of operation only 11,000 were enrolled in DirigoChoice (out of a total uninsured population of 136,000), and over two-thirds of these were already covered. 2. Of the small companies eligible to participate, only 2.5% actually did. 3. The financing scheme (a “savings offset payment”) is impossible to measure or implement. 4. Almost as many people (3,600) had disenrolled from the program as were newly insured by it.

Although the report is fairly comprehensive at 26 pages, nowhere does it mention the cost of the program to Maine’s taxpayers or the cost per newly-enrolled person.