Hundreds protest Anthem, MaineHealth partnership

Central Maine residents turned out in the hundreds in Auburn Thursday to protest the pending agreement between Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and MaineHealth to offer an insurance network on Maine’s health care exchange under the federal Affordable Care Act.

The Portland Press Herald reported that scores of people wearing neon-green T-shirts provided by Central Maine Medical Center with the saying, “Please keep care local,” attended the public hearing, which was the third of four to be held by the state Bureau of Insurance. The hearing addressed whether Anthem can transfer about 9,000 subscribers to new insurance plans.

The new network would include 32 of Maine’s 38 hospitals, but exclude the three hospitals owned by Central Maine Healthcare of Lewiston, Parkview Adventist Medical Center in Brunswick, York Hospital in York and Mercy Hospital in Portland.

Central Maine Medical Center has criticized the Anthem-MaineHealth plan, saying it discriminates against insurance subscribers in central and western Maine who might have to travel farther to get to their doctors.

“At the end of the day, because of the arrangement that we have, we are able to provide lower rates. And we think people deserve to have lower insurance rates,” Anthem spokesman Chris Dugan said in a report aired by WCSH6 TV.

Maine has an especially difficult task containing health costs because it ranks fifth among the states for per-capital health care costs, according to 2009 federal statistics quoted by the Press Herald.

“We are a very rural state, we are the oldest state in the nation, and older people have higher per-capita health care costs. And we don't have a lot of competition in our health care markets," Mitchell Stein, public policy director for Maine-based Consumers for Affordable Health Care, told the newspaper.