Dirigo Health is an unsustainable approach to solving Maine’s health insurance crisis.

One of the more surprising things about Gov. Baldacci’s re-election effort is how little has been said about his signature initiative, Dirigo Health. One might think that the governor would be eager to share with voters how successful the program has been at broadening insurance coverage and lowering premiums.

Or has it? What exactly has been going on with this very expensive program about which we hear almost nothing?

It turns out that what is happening with the program depends on whom you ask. In a recent press release, the governor claimed that 15,400 were enrolled in the program. Information provided by Dirigo Health itself on July 3, though, showed enrollment to be only 10,365. The discrepancy appears to be explained by the governor’s office counting Medicaid-enrolled parents as part of the Dirigo Health enrollment.

Regardless, the program’s original goals called for 44,300 previously uninsured Mainers to be covered by the summer of 2006, meaning the program is at least 75 percent below its own original enrollment goals. Worse still, a survey of Dirigo Health enrollees done last fall showed that only one in every four had been uninsured prior to joining the program, meaning that Dirigo has probably provided insurance to only about 2,500 people who were without it previously, putting the program closer to 95 percent under projections.

It is certainly fair to say that with regard to covering the uninsured, the Dirigo program is dramatically underperforming.

Dirigo’s supporters argue, though, that expanding health care coverage is a laudable goal, and indeed it is. But at what cost? What are we spending to provide coverage to so few people?

The Maine Heritage Policy Center calculated in January that for the program’s first nine months, it had spent $16,000 per Dirigo enrollee. At that level of spending, providing Dirigo Health coverage to 130,000 uninsured Mainers would cost over $2 billion a year, about two-thirds of the entire annual state budget. This level of spending, no matter how well intentioned, is clearly impossible for the state to sustain.

Even if, by some miracle, we could continue to fund Dirigo, providing insurance to more Maine people, what effect would any of this have on the majority of Maine people who already have health insurance on their own or through an employer and struggle to pay the premiums? Has Dirigo done anything to lower insurance premium costs?

In the spring of 2005, the Heritage Policy Center did a survey of insurance premiums, comparing premium costs for the same type person in both Maine and New Hampshire. They found that a 50-year-old male buying an individual policy from Anthem in New Hampshire paid $346 per month, while the same male buying a similar policy from the same insurance company in Maine paid $620 a month, or 44 percent more.

A recent look at Anthem’s Web site found that a year later, that same 50-year-old male would now pay $395 per month in New Hampshire, but a whopping $837 in Maine, an increase of 25 percent over last year’s premiums, and better than twice as much as the neighbor across the border, for the same policy, from the same insurance company.

Have your insurance premiums gone down as a consequence of all the “savings” Dirigo Health has supposedly generated?

The time has come to get real about health insurance reform. Dirigo has proven to be little more than an extremely costly expansion of Medicaid, only without any federal money to help support it. It is simply an unsustainable approach to solving Maine’s health insurance crisis.

What we need are reforms to Maine’s insurance regulations, which will lead to the kind of lower insurance premiums found in neighboring New Hampshire and across the nation. The creation of a high-risk pool will bring healthy people back into the insurance market, lowering premiums further still. Tort reform will mean less defensive medicine and thus lower costs. The more widespread use of Health Savings Accounts, put into Maine law by Republicans just this past year, will mean tax-free savings for medical expenses.

Maine people endure the second-highest insurance premiums in the nation, but they don’t need to. We cannot afford more costly experiments.

Maine people deserve better.

State Sen. Lois Snowe-Mello serves on the Labor and Natural Resources committees. She lives in Poland.