Governor’s Health Plan Sacrifices Poor Children

To The Editor:

In her Other Voices column “Changing Lives for the Better” (July 28), Gov. M. Jodi Rell touts the benefits of her Charter Oak Health Plan, stating “Charter Oak leverages private managed care companies who want to participate because the population being served is large enough to enable affordable premiums between $75 and $259 per month — less than half what a private plan would cost.”

This apparently is meant to convey the impression that she has created a new product by offering a large volume of uninsured individuals to insurers who would otherwise not be interested.

In fact, the governor had to offer up tens of thousands of poor children and their parents on the state’s HUSKY program who already have good health coverage in order to get HMOs to run her Charter Oak plan. She also had to offer these HMOs millions of taxpayer dollars, over and above what the state is now paying to run HUSKY and what the legislature appropriated.

The governor and the Department of Social Services used the children and their parents on HUSKY to coax the HMOs to offer Charter Oak, concluding that, without the reliable profits from running the much larger HUSKY program, no HMO wanted to offer the risky Charter Oak plan.

As her Commissioner of Social Services said bluntly in a Dec. 5, 2007 presentation to legislators: “DSS is combining the procurement [of Charter Oak and HUSKY] to allow the successful bidders to balance the familiar risk and large size of the HUSKY enrollment with the less familiar and less predictable size of the Charter Oak enrollment.”

The governor’s statement is more than simply another example of a politician making an unsubstantiated claim.

More than 240,000 low-income HUSKY enrollees, mostly poor children, will be forced out of their well-functioning health plans into new HMOs with different, and far fewer, health providers — just so the governor can claim to be doing something about the need for health insurance for the uninsured. So far, with one exception, only one hospital in Connecticut is willing even to contract with the new for-profit HMOs she has brought in to run HUSKY.

The governor should not be taking action that affirmatively harms Connecticut’s most vulnerable residents. This is especially true for HUSKY enrollees, who have endured disruptive changes. Earlier this year, HMOs previously running the HUSKY program left after refusing to be accountable to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, following years of poor performance with taxpayers’ money.

In addition, based on a new report by DSS’s auditor, Mercer Inc., the governor has agreed to pay the new HMOs at least $76 million more per year than it cost the taxpayers to run HUSKY under the previous HMOs just a few months ago, before HUSKY was turned into a non-risk program.

This was effectively a back door way of giving the new HMOs much more money than the legislature appropriated — $11 million — for the Charter Oak plan. Again, she had to engage in this kind of corporate welfare through HUSKY in order to entice them to run the Charter Plan they were otherwise uninterested in.

Although the Charter Oak plan is seriously flawed because of its very limited benefits, it’s good that the governor is at least recognizing the need for health coverage for the uninsured. But it’s another thing altogether to make poor children on HUSKY suffer as a way to meet that need. It’s another thing still to force the taxpayers to pay a lot more for health care delivery through private HMOs when it currently is being provided far more efficiently without them.

If Charter Oak is as good as the governor claims, it should be able to survive on its own without sacrificing vulnerable children and the taxpayers in the process.

Sheldon V. Toubman

Staff Attorney

New Haven Legal Assistance Association