My View: Helen Hanson on Advocacy and the Maine Report

I hear it all the time when I talk to co-workers.  “We need health insurance,” they always say to me. The drawback is the funding. With Maine’s budget the way it is, I honestly will be very surprised to see if the Legislature follows Ms. Kofman’s recommendation on the pilot.  But I am hopeful.

The Bureau of Insurance report on options for providing health insurance to Maine’s direct care workers is finally complete and recommends that a pilot program be developed for covering direct care workers in our state. Having been involved in the process of producing the report, I think the recommendation of a pilot is great as it would be a way to show employers and policy makers that health insurance is important to this workforce.

The report was a result of action taken by the Insurance and Financial Services Committee on the Direct Care Worker Coalition’s bill during the 2008 session. I was involved in both advocating for the bill and contributing to the report, because I feel it is a grave injustice to us direct care workers and the kind of work we do that we cannot get health insurance through our work.

The bill was to expand Dirigo, Maine’s health insurance program for small businesses and individuals, to let more direct care workers participate by allowing employers with more than 50 employees enroll and by subsidizing individuals with their premium costs. When the bill was going before Insurance and Financial Services, I presented testimony, explaining to the committee that the work I do is important and rewarding in other ways than monetary.

When the committee voted “Ought not to Pass” on the bill because of Maine’s bleak budgetary problems, it felt like just another hurdle to overcome. When I heard Senator Nancy Sullivan make the recommendation to further look into insuring direct care workers, it was like music to my ears. At first, I was not sure that I had heard her correctly. I still look at that recommendation as a small victory, it was another chance to educate policy makers as to the important work we do and the little compensation we receive.  I wrote a letter to Senator Sullivan, thanking her for the recommendation and telling her that I wanted to sit in on the work group.  A few weeks later, I received a phone call from Superintendent Mila Kofman, asking me to sit on the work group. I was very pleased that she asked me. Again, another chance to let a direct care worker talk to policy makers and educate them a bit!

The work group convened over the summer. We talked about the direct care workforce and the problems we face; i.e., low wages, no benefits, no paid time off. We looked into various types of Maine’s insurance codes to see which ones may benefit direct care workers. It was soon obvious that the workforce would need some sort of subsidy to help pay for health insurance and that the Medicaid reimbursement rates were too low to allow employers to offer health insurance to their workers. It also became apparent that DirigoChoice is probably the best option to gaining health insurance for direct care workers because Dirigo was designed to insure low-income folks and help with a subsidy to pay premiums.

The glitch in the whole thing is the state of Maine’s budget. Deficits are looming again. Maine has to have a balanced budget, so cuts have to be made in order to achieve that. With revenues falling short, there isn’t much left over to fund this project. MaineCare continues to be hit with budget cuts. It is a challenge to find the funding for this. Dirigo is currently closed to individuals who require subsidies. Again, budget problems are the cause. However, I plan to work hard to educate the legislature that Maine’s direct care workers need this pilot program.  I hope we can be successful.

Helen Hanson
Direct Care Worker
China, Maine