Worker-Led Push for Health Care Coverage Makes “Amazing” Progress in Maine

Helen Hanson, third from right; Joyce Gagnon, fourth from right “I’ve only been doing this for a year, but a lot of people who have been doing it for a long time are telling me that this has never happened before,” says home care worker Helen Hanson. “They’re saying: “Wow! This is the closest we’ve ever gotten!” Hanson is talking about a meeting she arranged on Tuesday to talk about LD1059, a bill that would establish a pilot project to provide affordable health care coverage to some of Maine’s direct care workers. The meeting In the room on Tuesday were Hanson and some of her fellow direct care worker advocates along with the most powerful group ever to gather in one state to talk about how to improve health care coverage for direct care workers. They included:

• Senator Nancy Sullivan, the bill’s sponsor;
• Speaker of the House Hannah Pingree;
• Senate President Libby Mitchell;
• Trish Riley, the director of the Governor’s Office of Health Policy and Finance and the governor’s main advisor on health care issues;
• Brenda Harvey, Commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services;
• Mila Kofman, Superintendent of the Maine Bureau of Insurance; and
• Several Representatives who sit on the Insurance and Financial Services Committee, which is developing the bill.

“We didn’t get any hard and fast ‘We’re going to do this and we’re going to make it work’ - but none of us went in expecting that,” says Hanson. “But we did get the key leadership people in the House and Senate, and a lot of other important people, to start talking about how they could make this happen.” Joyce Gagnon, a former direct care worker and the program coordinator for Maine PASA, the state’s direct care worker association, set the tone at Tuesday’s meeting by talking about the ordeal she went through several years ago when, still doing direct care work and unable to afford health insurance, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Hanson pointed out that poor wages and a shortage of affordable health insurance makes it hard to find and keep the new direct care workers we need. The head of Home Care for Maine reinforced that point, telling the group that her turnover rates average about 45% a year. And Allison Lee from PHI’s Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign described a recently instituted Montana pilot program to cover several hundred direct care workers, which could be a model for Maine. How it happened “This was a true worker-led effort: Joyce Gagnon and Helen Hanson made it happen,” says Roy Gedat, the Direct Care Alliance’s national policy director. “Joyce has been working on this for years through Maine PASA, and it could never have happened without a leader like Helen, who has the dedication and wherewithal to push all this through. They organized a coalition, they got all the movers and shakers together, and they did it in an environment where almost everyone else just has their tail between their legs. This is a very high level of advocacy – it’s amazing.” It took a lot of groundwork to get there. “It’s been a long process,” says Kurt Wise, acting facilitator for the Maine Direct Care Worker Coalition (DCWC), which spearheaded the effort. “We’ve spent five or six years getting studies done and educating people in many committees. It is a great example of an incremental process of educating and building support.” Hanson joined the effort relatively late, becoming involved last year. When the bill died in committee last summer, Hanson sent a letter to Senator Sullivan, the committee’s chair, in hopes being appointed to the work group Sullivan had ordered to study the issue. Hanson was told not to expect a response for at least a couple of weeks, “but the next evening I’d just gotten home, I was washing my potatoes for supper, and the phone rang. It was Mila Kofman, the superintendant of insurance for the state of Maine. I was like ‘Whoa, those wheels turned wicked fast!’” With assistance from Gedat and others, Hanson filed the latest bill, found its sponsor, and worked with Speaker of the House Pingree to figure out how to move it forward. And she set up the meeting this week that got the people who could make it happen together to talk about what it might look like and how it might get done. Why it matters “Thanks to the dogged efforts of Helen Hanson, Joyce Gagnon, and Roy Gedat, it appears that the DCWC now may have the best opportunity yet to secure tangible help for DCWs at the State House,” wrote Wise in an email after Tuesday’s meeting. “This is far more visibility and attention from the actual experts and decision-makers on this issue than we ever have had before. That is very, very good.” Related material: A PHI case study of the Montana plan (pdf) Elise Nakhnikian Communications Director Direct Care Alliance Responses to this post on the DCA Blog Julie Moulton, Fellow VOICES 2008 Graduate Way to go Maineiacs, did you think a year ago you would be having all those stakeholders in one room talking? Rhonda Edwards, Administrator of Tender Touch, Inc., a Home-Based Care Provider I have been an administrator for this Pss Agency now for over 4 years, and that is a very big concern is Health coverage. I can’t even afford health coverage for my family. The deductables are too high, and the monthly payments are unaffordable. We have had many workers leave our company to go where there is coverage for their families. We wouldn’t have lost them if we had an opportunity to offer affordable coverage for them and the business. It is a shame that Gov Baldacci words of no child will have to go with out coverage for health insurance. On a personal note, just last year alone we (husband and I) spent over $10,000 just for our daughter’s medical bills, not even counting ours. I know that the hospitals have offered some help with dicounts, but if there were other companies allowed into the state of Maine maybe the health insurance would be affordable. Or for people applying for MaineCare who are over the income cutoff, why not allow them to pay the difference with the MaineCare guidelines as a monthly payment? I applied last year for MaineCare and I was $200 a month over the guidelines. Why couldn’t I have paid the state that $200 a month towards the Mainecare? Just an idea for someone to hear about different options that are out there to help people recieve health care. Something has to be done.