Dirigo Health: Don’t compound the illness
By Kent Price
WALDO COUNTY (Aug 29, 2004): Last week’s Citizen reported that as many as 3,500 of Maine’s hospital jobs may be at risk under cost-cutting ideas being considered by the Commission to Study Maine Hospitals, part of the Dirigo Health plan soon to be under way. Asked to comment on this prospect, Mark Biscone is not at a loss for words: “Devastating, outrageous and horrible,” are just a few.
Biscone, CEO of Waldo County General Hospital, is not crying wolf. The hospital has cut services, reduced positions, and is among the state’s most-efficient facilities. Yet, if the proposed reductions are approved, the hospital may have to trim an additional 40 to 50 positions, directly affecting patient care services.
Are across-the-board cuts appropriate for all Maine hospitals? Does one size fit all? Does community need diminish along with position cuts, or is the opposite more likely? The very fact that such a high degree of controversy exists suggests that, as the movie line has it, we have here a failure to communicate. State health policymakers need to collaborate closely with those most directly affected by their decisions.
Still, few would deny that a health care crisis exists and that Dirigo Health is a bold and positive bid to insure the uninsured, reduce costs for both individuals and small businesses and boost preventative programs. It is a Maine original — unique in the nation — and other states are looking at us closely. Dirigo means “I lead” and we are doing just that.
But if Dirigo is pioneering, it also may be only a step in the right direction. In what might be called consumer-owned medicine, national health insurance would take high-profit insurance companies out of the health-care equation while extending coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who lack it.
A year ago, in August 2003, nearly 8,000 physicians, including two former U.S. Surgeons General and hundreds of medical school deans and professors, proposed a plan for national health insurance. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they said a national single-payer plan not only is the best way to deal with our mounting health-care crisis, it is the only way.
National health insurance is not pie in the sky. Every other industrialized nation in the world takes care of its people in this way. Only in the U.S., and only because of an accident of history, are employers the primary providers of health insurance. It makes little sense, and the whole system now is breaking down under soaring costs and lack of coverage. Neither our health nor our wallets can afford it anymore.
It may well be years before the U.S. joins the rest of the world in guaranteeing basic health care to all our citizens. In the meantime, let’s be sure not to make a bad problem worse by cutting needed community services. After all, the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians provides that, “First, do no harm.”
Kent Price is a Democratic candidate for Maine House District 41, which includes Searsport, Frankfort, Stockton Springs, Prospect, Verona Island and Orland.
