The Legislature’s Insurance Committee had already passed a valuable bill to identify the causes of rising health care costs and a bill to self-insure Dirigo Health when its members began in earnest to overhaul the state plan to provide affordable health coverage, a reform made necessary by the limited state dollars and high cost of care. By the time three proposals emerged from committee, the idea of an overhaul was reduced to more of a tuneup – still very much needed – and then it wasn’t even that.

Dirigo Health is still very much in business, more solid than ever after a court decision this spring that upheld its funding method of reinvesting savings from more efficient care into expanded coverage. The self-insurance bill would allow it to use money currently going to profits at Anthem, which administers the plan, and pay for coverage. In some ways, the failure of the final reform bill to pass gives lawmakers needed time to craft the future of Dirigo.

House Insurance Committee Chairman John Brautigam got it right when he said of Dirigo reform, “There can be no deadline in the effort to find the solutions we need. There is consensus on the goals of improved access, uniform quality and reduced costs. There are diverging ideas about how to get there.”

Those diverging ideas are, in part, based on a lack of information, which is where the bill identifying costs, LD 1849, comes in. That bill would expand the state Council on Health Systems Development and examine health care markets, the supply and demand for services, cost and pricing for pharmaceuticals and the cost of capital equipment. The idea behind it is for Maine to stop speculating about why health care costs so much and gather extensive data on the costs.

That may take some time, but Maine would do better to hold off on further reform until it gets at least a sense, based on solid evidence, of the cost drivers here that make the state unusual. While gathering data, the council should also consider how the triangle of insurers, care providers and the business community that pays for most of the coverage works or fails to work to hold down prices.

For understandable reasons, the Baldacci administration asked lawmakers to broadly remake Dirigo this session and for equally understandable reasons, the Legislature replied that it needed more data before going further. Lawmakers should take their time to ensure that the next version of Diri becomes an even stronger and more effective health plan than it is today.