Health benefits | Making Mainers healthier and supporting health innovation will deliver a critical booster shot to the economy
Delivering health care to Maine residents is a complex task. The state has a small population but a large territory, urban centers and rural areas with politics as diverse as its geography, high death rates due to cancer and Alzheimer’s and, with its median age of 41.1 years, the oldest population in the nation, according to the Maine Department of Labor. All of this means Maine’s businesses will suffer job losses unless we collaborate and find creative solutions to aging and illness.
Few would deny that the health care industry is critical to our economy. Health care and social services account for 30% of jobs in Maine, and if you include technical, scientific and professional positions created by Maine research laboratories or in small companies serving the health care industry, the total increases to 40%. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 54% of private business employees in Maine receive health insurance, a rate similar to the national average. Yet the 19% of the population on Medicaid dwarfs the national average of 7%. This should be a wake-up call to the state’s education, business and health care system to seek a collective solution to lower reliance on this federal program for the poor. It also makes it so important to deliver the right services at the right cost to decrease the number of Mainers addressing health problems at late, often pricey, stages. Maine’s Dirigo Health objectives have attempted to address this complex goal.
According to Dirigo’s 2006-2007 Annual Report, “patients in certain Maine communities are up to three times more likely to receive expensive procedures than an identical patient in another community, even when there is no evidence that the procedure is what’s known as a ‘best practice’ for a given medical condition.” Variations in efficiency, the report says, aren’t related to the demographics of the local population, but instead by the availability of quality health care in the area and the preferences and training of the medical staff.
So the question is: How do we spend our limited state funds wisely to keep all of Maine’s employees healthy?
The right investments
Twenty-seven percent of Maine’s current labor force will begin retiring in the next 10 years, according to the Maine Department of Labor. Unless Maine invests in addressing the problem of health care delivery, its economic outlook is bleak. Maine’s near-term population growth is projected to consist of people 55 years old and older, according to Northeastern’s Center for Labor Market Studies, and though the DOL predicts that generation’s reliance on health care means much of the job growth in the next decade will come from the health care sector, it may be difficult for Maine businesses to find the health care workers to fill those positions. This makes efforts to eliminate the expensive medical procedures and redundancies highlighted by the Dirigo Health agency all the more necessary.
Maine’s residents in 2007 passed the $50 million research and development bond that will be used in part to address the urgent health care crisis. This bond gives Maine a chance to provide its residents cost-effective approaches to improving their health status. The University of New England in Biddeford, for example, was awarded part of the bond to help it build a College of Pharmacy program that will hire and educate a new employee base for the state, and the Jackson Laboratory received funds to encourage its product development pipeline. This is one way to grow our health care economy not on the backs of our unhealthiest residents but with bold research and clinical approaches.
But for this initiative to work well, it requires new partnerships between the public and private sectors. The state must give the health care sector and its related businesses the support they need to provide the best and most cost-effective solutions to address the health care jobs crisis. The state needs to establish more R&D incentives for business, health care and educational institutions to encourage them to implement best practices and solutions to address the health care crunch. Maine is poised to be a model for the country in addressing how to deliver the right care at the right time for the right price to its residents, and create jobs appropriate to its needs without bankrupting its taxpayers.
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