Despite strong opposition from several organizations and general opposition from the public, Maine’s superintendent of insurance Alessandro Iuppa approved the sale of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine to Anthem Insurance Co. earlier this month. Now all that’s left to do is agree on a price.

Not that Blue Cross and Anthem have yet to agree. They’ve agreed to $102 million, $81.7 million of which is to placed in a charitable trust. But some of the groups who tried to stop the sale, notably Consumers for Affordable Health Care, believe both that the sale number is too low and was not arrived at under the state statute governing the sale. This is not mere obstructionism. Their view was supported at the sale hearing by the closing statements of the Maine’s Attorney General Andrew Ketterer.

In brief, the Maine statute required the sale to include an appraisal of fair market value of Blue Cross, along with “the methodology for fixing a final value coincident with the completion of the transactions provided for in the conversion plan.” That is, an appraiser must set a value for the company at the time of the sale and show how that value was derived.

The last full appraisal — by the firm of Houlihan, Lokey, Howard & Zukin — of Blue Cross was done in July 1999, which set the fair market value at $102.5 million. A lot has happened to Blue Cross since then. It has, for instance, posted 1999 losses at a surprising $17 million, but it also has gained market share, going from 320,000 subscribers to 440,000 at the time of the sale as one competitor left the state and another found itself in serious financial straits. Its growth in subscribers now make it easily the dominant insurer in Maine, with less and less competition.

But based on the ’99 losses, Superintendent Iuppa agreed to a readjust the market value of the company downward, to $81.7 million. According to the Attorney General’s Office, however, the method used to arrive at this number was inadequate. Missing from the analysis but present in the original appraisal were “changes in the company’s performance, its recent projected performance, market information, changes in trading prices of comparable companies, and recent merger and acquisition activity.”

The appeal by Consumers for Affordable Health Care, filed in Kennebec County Superior Court, reiterates much of this, and given the rapid and dramatic changes in health-care insurance over the last year, both in Maine and nationally, makes a fair request. It wants a new appraisal done that will take into account the dozens of variables that affect a company’s value and more fully reflect the actual condition of Blue Cross at the time of sale.

Given the price being paid for the insurer and the multi-million-dollar swings in value and in the size of charitable trust, spending several thousand dollars on a new appraisal is a reasonable investment. It wouldn’t change the outcome of the sale, but could give the people of Maine more confidence in the price they will get for the company and the charitable trust they will rely on for years to come.