From the transcript of the Public Hearing of the Human Services Committee - January 18, 2007:

REP. VILLANO: Thank you, Senator Harris. Our first speaker is Chris Donovan, House Majority Leader.

REP. DONOVAN: Good morning, everyone. Nice to see everyone. Senator Harris, Representative Villano, Members of the Committee, it's good to see everybody here.

We're back in Session, and working on important issues to the people of our state. It's great to see us here together, especially the Human Services Committee, and your fine work.

I'm here to talk about the managed care plan, particularly for the HUSKY program, and I have testimony that's handed out, as well as attachment of a letter that I wrote in July of 2005 requesting information regarding the payments to healthcare providers under the Medicaid Managed Care system.

I think what the concern is, many of us feel very proud of the HUSKY program, something we've been working on actually prior, before HUSKY, under the leadership of Representative Thompson of expanding healthcare for children in our state year after year, and then it culminated in the HUSKY program, and we're very proud of the fact that we have a program that provides healthcare for our kids.

The problem we're finding out is that on paper, it's a great program, and the reality, we're finding, there's a lot of problems.

We're finding that the services are not being delivered, so we have a responsibility as a state to say, this is a program we've put together. Why aren't there services being delivered?

Why aren't the children getting the care they need? Why can't a child find a dentist? Why can't they have appointments? What's going on?

So, in trying to find out the problem, oftentimes we say well, what are we paying? Why aren't we getting the services?

The problem is, we're not finding information about where we're paying because we use HMOs to deliver the services. A number of the HMOs have declined to provide the information to us, where our money is being spent.

We spend $700 million, and we don't know where that money is going. But we do know the service is not being delivered.

And I talk about a survey that was recently done by Mercer. It's called A Secret Shopper, where they tried to get appointments, and they found they only got, they only were able to obtain appointments for about 25% of the time.

So here we have a public/private partnership with only delivery system based on this survey, of about 25%, 25% efficient.

Imagine your postal carrier delivering the mail twice a week. Imagine your firefighter responding to every third emergency. That's not efficient. That's not efficient.

And the public demands that we be efficient in our services. The public says we support the HUSKY program.

So how do we have something that we support, the public supports, and also remain efficient? I'm glad that this Committee is dealing with this issue because we want to be accountable to the public, and we also want to provide the service.

Sure, we can save money on the HUSKY program if no one uses it. But that's not the purpose. The purpose is, we're looking to provide healthcare.

As we look forward this year in dealing more, and expanding healthcare, and looking at affordability of healthcare for the people in our state, we want to make sure we have a model that works, not a model that doesn't work.

We don't want to put together a plan that looks good on paper, that doesn't deliver healthcare for the people in our state.

So, as I said here, in the past we used to do it in house. Other states do different ways of providing the service.

There's another example here, use of the PCCM, Primary Care Case Management is another idea. I know you'll be hearing about that.

But right now we have a problem. We spent $700 million. Advocates have gone to the Freedom of Information Commission, and tried to find out the information.

A judge has ruled in our behalf that said this information should be brought to us. Three out of the four HMOs have refused to provide that information.

We have a private/public partnership, and our private partner is not behaving like a good partner, not delivering the service, and hiding the books, so we need to do something about that.

And I thank this Committee for hearing me today, and addressing this important issue because it deals with the needs of our community, and a way of delivering services in an accountable fashion. Thank you very much.

REP. VILLANO: Thank you, Chris. One question from me. The question of accountability and transparency, we talked about that in the past.

I think that has to be part of the equation--

REP. DONOVAN: Absolutely.

REP. VILLANO: --of any new contract, new extension.

REP. DONOVAN: Absolutely. When we put budgets together here in this room and other rooms, we go through detail about where our dollars are being spent.

You can get a budget document to tell you where the dollars are being spent. You can find out from the Department of Administrative Services how much we're paying various people to provide services throughout the state.

But when we're dealing with healthcare, it's a mystery, and government should not be a mystery when it comes to funds being spent for services.

REP. VILLANO: Thank you. Other questions? Other questions from Committee Members? If not, thank you very much, Representative Donovan.

REP. DONOVAN: Thank you.