A lawmaker, businesses, citizens and medical groups have formed a coalition in support of measures designed to reduce health care costs throughout the system.
Rep. Sharon Treat, D-Farmingdale, backed by Consumers for Affordable Health Care and the new Maine Voices for Coverage coalition, announced Thursday that she will sponsor legislation this session that she calls a “Health Care Bill of Rights.” The legislation will support the goals of the coalition and mirror the recommendations in a report released Thursday by Consumers for Affordable Health Care called “A Call to Action on Health Care Reform: The Transparency Imperative.”
Treat’s legislation would limit the percentage of premium payments spent by insurance companies on administration, require insurance companies to publicly justify rate increases by revealing the data they used and require public disclosure of insurance policy details so consumers can compare them. The bill also calls for the state’s superintendent of insurance to perform “market conduct exams” every three years to identify and weed out misconduct.
“You would think that when you invest in health insurance, at a monthly cost that can easily exceed a mortgage payment, that you would have the same opportunity to know what you are buying, but you don’t have that opportunity,” said Treat during a press conference. “Amazingly, you can buy an insurance policy today without knowing what it will cover and without being able to compare the policy with what another company offers.”
Joseph P. Ditre, executive director of Consumers for Affordable Health Care, said fixing health care problems in Maine starts with introducing transparency into the process of determining what consumers and insurers are paying for.
“Dramatic increases in health insurance premiums, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses have created an affordability issue for many people in our state, leaving nearly 125,000 without any coverage and many others avoiding needed care, and the cost of providing access to coverage has become burdensome, if not prohibitive, for many Maine businesses,” he said.
The report released Thursday recommends a range of reforms in addition to the ones addressed in Treat’s bill. They include disclosure requirements for insurance companies about their lobbying and marketing activities, standardized benefit packages for small group plans and insurance claim and explanation of benefit forms that are the same for all consumers.
For health care providers, the report calls for detailed estimates of what treatment for various ailments will cost and reporting that ties cost and quality data together, which essentially would be a physician ranking system.
Gordon Smith, a spokesman for the Maine Medical Association, said the problems in health care are frustrating for everyone involved.
“The interests of physicians and patients are increasingly aligned,” he said. “The system currently is not serving either group well. The system has been developed around the needs of insurance companies and the insurers themselves are as frustrated as the patients.”
Treat’s legislation had not been printed as of Tuesday morning. The full report by Consumers for Affordable Health Care can be found at the Web site www.mainecahc.org/foundation/mainevoicesforcoverage.htm.
(Statehouse News Service)
