Recently, I was appointed to serve on the Maine Legislature’s Joint Select Committee on Health Care Reform Opportunities and Implementation, a bipartisan group of legislators charged with examining the new national health care reform and preparing our state for implementation.

Expanding access to quality and affordable health care was and will continue to be a top priority of Democratic lawmakers in the state legislature. Continuing a tradition of leadership in the health care arena, we passed several laws that provide greater access to health care for children, the disabled and the elderly, while also cutting costs. Several of Maine’s policies were used as a blueprint for the development of the national health care reform, so we are prepared to implement the benefits of the federal law more quickly for our citizens.

In Maine, we passed first-in-the-nation legislation banning annual and lifetime caps on insurance policies, protecting those suffering from severe illness from also facing catastrophic debt. Maine’s law complements and precedes a measure in national health care reform that eliminates lifetime caps, which will take four years to fully be in place in other states.

In Maine, health insurance companies have lifetime limits as low as $45,000 and as high as $5 million. The most common limit is $3 million. According to information provided by the Maine Bureau of Insurance, Anthem decided this year to limit the amount of care people could get, changing a majority of its plans from having no lifetime caps to having $3 million caps. This change happened despite federal and state efforts to eliminate lifetime caps.

Eliminating annual or lifetime caps now will directly benefit Mainers battling cancer and fighting other chronic diseases such as hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

I am proud to have co-sponsored a measure to expand access to vaccines to all Maine children and reduce costs of immunizations. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that every dollar spent on vaccinations results in direct medical cost savings of $6.30. Vaccination rates in Maine once led the nation but have declined over recent years, with fewer than 80 percent of children under age three receiving the recommended vaccination.

The law establishes the Universal Childhood Immunization Program to provide all children 18 years of age or younger with access to a uniform set of vaccines. The program is administered by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services for the purposes of optimizing public and private resources and lowering the cost of providing immunizations to children by leveraging contract prices for vaccines established through the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In November, Maine voters will decide on a bond referendum to expand access to rural dental clinics and to build a dental school to provide the needed clinical and academic education to get more qualified people into the field of dentistry.

According to a study from the Muskie School, Maine has a 30 percent higher rate of emergency department use than other states. The number one cause of visits is dental emergencies. There are 12,000 visits each year at an annual cost of $6 million for dental emergencies. Increasing access to dental care in rural areas and dental training will help lower these costs and make for a healthier Maine.

One of the key components of any health care reform is using prevention as a way to drive down costs. Reducing emergency room visits by giving more people access to health care can detect and prevent major health issues, bringing down costs. Healthy people mean healthy parents, workers and economy.

As a member of the Maine Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to help implement the federal health care reform measure and continuing my work to ensure access to health care. Maine has led the nation in state-level programs to improve health care and is poised to reap the benefits of federal and state governments working together on this most important issue.

— State Rep. Mark Eves, D-South Berwick, is a mental health practitioner in private practice in Sanford. He is a member of the legislative Health and Human Services Committee.