If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. This is a motto Gov. Baldacci believes in, especially when it concerns his signature program, Dirigo health. This experimental, controversial and expensive venture has made only negligible progress at best, with respect to its original goals, but the governor is by no means ready to call it quits.

Despite a lavish advertising campaign and scores of paid lobbyists, Dirigo gets only lackluster public interest. Most people are now paying attention to it only because the new “Dirigo tax” impacts them directly. Other folks may have heard about the lawsuits concerning the Dirigo tax, filed against the state by Maine’s insurance industry, the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and the Maine Bankers Association. In response to these and other unfavorable developments, the governor decided the time was right to pilot this leaky ship even further into uncharted waters.

At a public hearing on March 21, before the Legislature’s Insurance and Financial Services Committee, the new plan was unveiled. Committee members listened to nearly five hours of testimony on LD 1845, the new Dirigo “self-insurance” scheme.

The idea of self-insuring is one that large business entities have long embraced. These are businesses that have a large pool of relatively healthy, working employees to spread the risk. They have large human resources departments to administer these complex plans, and they have a business that continues to provide any necessary funds to keep the plan going. Yet Bath Iron Works, which recently experimented with a self-insurance plan, has gone back to buying health coverage for its employees because self-insurance was simply too expensive.

The proponents of this new Dirigo scheme believe they can save large amounts of money by eliminating the “middle man” and the profit motive of commercial insurance. But self-insurance is not an easy system to set up and the amount saved in comparison to buying commercial insurance can be illusory.

Lest we forget, Maine has an abysmal record in regard to its ability to administer a health plan. MaineCare, our version of Medicaid, dissolved into chaos when a new computerized payment computer went haywire. MaineCare bureaucrats sent out $400 million in “estimated” payments to providers and are now trying to get the money back.

Providers who received no payment at all began refusing to see Medicaid patients. The ensuing accounting mess will take years to sort out.

To cap it off, Maine kept adding people to the MaineCare rolls when the program was already unsustainable, and then refused to pay hospitals for treating them. The state and the federal government now owe Maine hospitals $364 million for services already rendered. The MaineCare debacle is one of the most colossal fiascos in state history, and does not inspire confidence that the Baldacci bureaucrats can handle self-insurance for Dirigo.

And there are other troubling aspects to the governor’s newest “bold” scheme. The new-phase Dirigo program has been specifically designed to avoid mandatory compliance with the insurance laws of this state. It seems the governor believes that the new Dirigo program would be more successful if it were free from our burdensome insurance regulations – regulations that the insurance industry has been seeking relief from for years.

The funding mechanism for the new plan is vague at best. The Savings Offset Payment (the “Dirigo tax”) was set up to subsidize low and medium income individuals, yet this new proposal would use the SOP to support the new program.

The current Dirigo scheme is subject to legislative oversight. The program must follow the letter of the law and not make up its own laws. If it feels a change is necessary, it must bring legislation to the Insurance and Financial Services Committee. This new Dirigo venture would eliminate legislative oversight and unbridle the Dirigo board of directors, leaving the program completely unhinged from any legislative control.

Reimbursement rates to providers in the new plan are unclear. It is very possible that the new Dirigo, instead of paying commercial insurance rates to health care providers, could use lower MaineCare rates – rates that don’t even cover a hospital’s costs.

At the public hearing for this latest Dirigo venture, committee members posed some tough questions. Here are a few: “What are the legal liabilities the state will face?” “Will the additional administration be sub-contracted out?” And most importantly, “Where will the money come from to fund this plan?”

The answers were often vague and incomplete. “We’re going to work that out,” the committee was assured. “I’m not sure about that,” we were told, and “We’ll get that info for you next week.”

It’s beginning to look as though this new plan, like its predecessor, has not been completely thought out. Make no mistake about it – this is one more step toward a single-payer health plan for Maine. As we are in an election year, it has been put on the fast track and with what seems little attention to those “pesky” details.

Persistence in the face of failure can be an admirable trait and it is beginning to be hallmark of this administration. Continuing to spend vast sums of taxpayers’ money on an experimental, controversial, and yes, unsuccessful program such as Dirigo goes beyond perseverance. It is an extravagant waste.

Rep. Jon McKane, R-Newcastle, is an electrical contractor.