Proponent pushes statewide health care

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Dana Millan has been going to communities across the state for months drumming up support for a bill that she feels will solve the state’s health care problems.

On Tuesday, she was here in Gallup seeking support from the McKinley County Commission.

She pointed out that a lot of people — many of them in the state Legislature — have plans on how to address the growing cost of health insurance and the growing number of people who can’t afford to get health insurance.

She’s a member of Health Security for New Mexicans, a group that has been working for the past 15 years to get a health plan enacted that would cover all New Mexicans.

The proposal has evolved to its present form — the creation of a cooperative that will cover 1.6 million New Mexicans, almost everybody in the state. It would not do away with private insurance, but private insurance companies would sell supplemental insurance and almost everyone in the state would belong to the main group.

The way it would work is that those who pay for insurance now — governments and private businesses — would pay into this system and individuals would pay a monthly premium based not on their age or their health condition but on their income. The result will be an insurance plan, said Millan, that will at least be as good as the one that state employees now have.

The theory is that a group this size would be able to self-insure itself and ultimately it would save individuals and companies a lot of money. “If this had been implemented in 1994, it would have saved almost $4.6 billion by 2004,” Millan said.

Right now all this is still in the theory stage and the plan is, she said, to seek $100,000 from the state Legislature to do a feasibility study to see if it is workable.

If it’s not workable or it will cost too much money, the group will drop the plan and that will be it, she said. But if the study says it is workable, it will take three years to get it up and running.

The commission was not asked for any financial support but for a resolution showing the commission felt the project was worth pursuing.

Since this was just a discussion item, no vote was taken on Tuesday but county officials said it is expected to come up again at the next county commission meeting on Feb. 17 for a vote to approve or reject.