A warning this week from a legislator about the new Dirigo health plan was disturbing. State Rep. Chris O’Neil of Saco, chairman of the Insurance and Financial Services Committee, essentially predicts Dirigo’s failure in several ways, leading to an unworkable system.

His warning is useful but premature. Another way for residents to appreciate the potential of this bold idea in health care coverage is to understand that it is a collection of many elements needed to improve the delivery of care in Maine. In several areas, Dirigo already looks like a winner.

Rep. O’Neil wrote this week that Dirigo was passed only tentatively by the Legislature. “Recognizing that Dirigo was an imperfect concept (even after weeks of negotiation), and a deeply flawed bill, we agreed to pass it ‘as-is’ and to consider it a work in progress – a law to be improved after enactment,” he wrote in a widely distributed press release. But a year later, he says, proposed amendments to Dirigo “have been summarily cast aside.”

Specifically, he worries that “the cost of the Dirigo product will be no more competitive (and for non-subsidized enrollees, more expensive) than what the market has produced on its own, and the red tape for employees and their employers is bound to discourage robust enrollment.”

“Dirigo,” he writes, “is destined to become a de facto high-risk pool, with no incentive for younger, healthier consumers to join/remain in the pool.”

What’s worse is its “command-and-control cost containment measures,” such as a capped certificate-of-need process. At best, these mean “that a few people might get some temporary coverage for health care they didn’t otherwise have,” but the system is “bound for mediocrity or maybe even national embarrassment.”

Rep. O’Neil says one of his primary disagreements with Dirigo is that it is voluntary. He would prefer a mandatory system of insurance, which, of course, is the ultimate in command-and-control measures. Otherwise his concerns are understandable. Dirigo is the sort of risky step governments rarely take. It has many components that are untried and its designers in the Baldacci administration made many choices that could have been made otherwise and attracted just as many supporters and detractors.

To take one example, the voluntary vs. mandatory signup: Given the history of health coverage in the United States – begun by businesses in the 1940s to retain workers when a wage freeze was in place – ordering residents to join a state health-insurance system certainly would create a large pool of clients, but it also would generate resistance and hostility from many who don’t want their government choosing their health care provider. The obvious demand for affordable coverage may make a mandatory system unnecessary anyway. If Dirigo provides an attractive set of benefits, more than enough businesses and individuals will want in.

The most often discussed element of Dirigo is its subsidized coverage for people whose incomes do not exceed 300 percent of the federal poverty level (for a family of four, that’s around $48,000 annually). It’s an important piece, certainly, and its rates based on ability to pay are a badly needed change in how health coverage is viewed in the United States (the practice is common in other countries). But there is a lot more to Dirigo, including its requirement for quality improvements, expanded Medi-caid to draw federal support and transparent reporting of some data so that consumers can see what they are paying for and compare these costs and outcomes to those of other providers in the state.

Pooling resources is key to the success of Dirigo, and one of the under- reported parts of the new system is that it creates a public purchasing group for Medicaid, state workers, the university system, teachers, etc., enough people so that they can negotiate better prices and bring down the cost of care. This is crucial because Maine has neither a healthy insurance market nor a competitive care market – nearly all hospitals in Maine are in four large associations. Adding an entity whose function is to drive down prices may not be in the spirit of a free market, but there’s not much else free about the health care market here, leaving Maine with some of the highest health care costs in the nation.

With that in mind, it wasn’t surprising the state had but one bidder this month – Anthem – to offer Dirigo coverage. That makes negotiations more difficult, but not impossible. In the next couple of weeks, Maine residents will get a close look at this new product. Whatever they think of it, it’s worth remembering that Dirigo is a lot more than coverage.