Press Conference launches Legislation around Health Care Transparency

The press conference with our coalition partners at Maine Voices for Coverage was a big success last Thursday! MSEA-SEIU is part of this coalition through its membership with Consumers for Affordable Health Care. Check out some of the press coverage generated by the event, which included KVO Health Care chair and 771's president Helen Hanson delivering a powerfully affecting personal testimony: Bangor Daily News Article WCSH News 6 Coverage Maine Public Radio story Kennebec Journal Article Overall, a great start to our campaign to give patients and consumers the power of information in our health care system! This legislation that was unveiled Thursday is all about transparency when it comes to health insurance policies as well as to knowing what your doctors and hospitals will charge you for services up front. It is about knowing what exactly is covered by your insurance and what is not. It is about knowing exactly what your deductibles are. It is about knowing all this information before you buy the policy so you know exactly what you are spending your hard earned money on. This happened to me. I thought the policy I and my family had came with a $10,000 deductible. What it does come with is a deductible of $30,000 before it kicks in at 50/50! Each of us, in my family, have to meet the $10,000 deductible before the insurance begins to pay on certain services. That means that we all have to get sick, or rack up medicals bills over $30,000 before this so-called "insurance" would start to pay. This is absolutely outrageous, and there's no law from preventing this sort of thing from happening. Transparency would change that. Things like mammograms are covered, they are processed as going toward that deductible. Things like x-rays, lab tests, they are not covered. I would need to buy an outpatient rider. Then I find out that the rider is not available in Maine. If I had known all this before we signed on the dotted line, we never would have signed in the first place. I have no legal recourse, because there is a law that lets insurance companies get away with this sort of thing. I asked for help with this issue from the Bureau of Insurance and that is what I was told. Filing a complaint about fraud with the Attorney General's Office would do me no good. The transparency legislation put forth by Representative Sharon Treat and Consumers for Affordable Health Care will change that. It will make the insurance companies spell out what is covered and not, how deductibles work, all that before a consumer makes up his or her mind on whether to purchase the insurance. So now, me and my family are three of the 125,000 Mainers without health insurance. There is not much out there for options either. Thanks to the huge beverage lobby this fall, Dirigo lost upcoming revenue from the beer and soda tax. This means that Dirigo can no longer offer subsidies to help Mainers buy affordable, good quality health care insurance. There are no subsidies for sole proprietors, small businesses or individuals. My husband is a sole proprietor. It is not like we're not working to support ourselves. We are a few of the many who have fallen between the cracks when it comes to health insurance. Either you are filthy rich and health care is not a problem, or your extremely poor and get help through Medicaid. We fall in the middle. This is why I am very involved with groups like the Kennebec Valley Organization, Consumers for Affordable Health Care, MSEA-SEIU Local 1989, Health Care for America Now, the Direct Care Worker Coalition in an effort to bring about the necessary reforms this country needs when it comes to health care.