Solve state’s health care crisis soon

Your story, “Conferees warn single-payer health debate to be divisive” (BDN, Sept. 24), effectively articulates the controversy around single-payer health care. In my campaign, I am focusing on the goal – coverage for every Maine citizen – and proposing a new and different plan to achieve it. In February, I launched my campaign with a comprehensive plan to address the problems you cite and to make health care more affordable and accessible for all Mainers. This issue needs immediate attention, not division.

Since announcing my plan, I have traveled throughout the state and met Maine’s hard-working families who can’t afford health insurance, heard the problems of business – especially small business – trying to keep or get affordable coverage for their workers and talked to many health care professionals who are fed up with the complexity and unfairness of the system. Based on their stories and their guidance, I have strengthened my health plan and laid out the details that will make insurance available and affordable now. We need a health system in Maine that is comprehensive, understandable, affordable and fair.

It must provide health coverage for all Mainers.

It must cover the full range of needed benefits, including prevention and prescriptions, for Mainers of all ages.

It must establish quality standards, and provide benchmarks and an easily understandable way to compare providers and facilities.

It must embrace efficiencies to reduce waste, administrative costs and assure affordability.

In the first month of my administration, I will present to the Legislature a bill to allow us to create a new, nonprofit health insurer in Maine – a Maine company, with limits clearly placed on its administrative overhead, charged with developing products for Maine, at a price Maine can afford. I will also establish a Governor’s Office of Health Policy to coordinate Maine health policy and programs, implement my plan, and maximize federal and other resources, with the help of an action group of consumers, purchasers, providers, businesses and insurers.

My plan is a comprehensive reform addressing cost, access and quality.

It will accomplish the following:

. Create The Maine Health Plan by using government’s power to negotiate with insurers for the best buy for Maine consumers. We’ll start by joining all public purchasers together for volume discounts on quality products, but all Maine families and businesses can buy into this low-cost, high-quality insurance product. We’ll ask private insurers to bid but we’ll also have our new non-profit compete and we’ll use federal dollars available to us to help low-income Mainers pay their premium costs.

. Cover the uninsured through The Maine Health Plan and Maine Care and put an end to shifting those costs to premium payers.

. Create a standard benefits package to allow true comparisons of costs and coverage; standardize and simplify billing forms.

. Build healthy habits in our youth by bringing health services, health and physical education and mental health services to all our schools.

. Develop an enforceable state health plan to allocate costly technologies and facilities, keeping costs under control while assuring access to needed services.

. Work with Maine’s higher education institutions to provide training and retraining to link Maine people with jobs in the health care professions to meet shortages in these areas.

. Build a strong public health system to protect us against a wide range of threats, from exposure to environmental toxins to bioterrorism, with a comprehensive emergency health plan.

We need to maintain and improve quality while we work to make coverage secure and affordable. We must provide consumers with reliable information in an easy-to-use and compare format. We’ll simplify paperwork and billing to make the system more understandable.

I am committed to promoting quality care, reducing medical errors and identifying and increasing the use of best practices. And finally, I believe that for any health insurance plan for Maine to be successful, we must ensure access to the full range of care – physical, mental and dental, including coverage of the full range of needed benefits, including prevention and prescriptions.

As your article warns, we cannot go to our corners and point fingers; rather we need to work together to solve Maine’s health care crisis. I pledged in February and reaffirm today that, if elected governor, I will involve all stakeholders and start on day one of my administration to make real these plans. It’s a promise I hope the voters will hold me to – we need to end our divisions, and I pledge we’ll work together to make sure all Maine citizens have affordable, quality health care.

John Baldacci, a member of Congress representing Maine’s 2nd District, is the Democratic candidate for governor.