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Attorney to captain health insurance plan

ErkenBrack trains to run statewide nonprofit group

By Joyzelle Davis, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 20, 2008 at midnight

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Steve ErkenBrack served three terms as Mesa County DA.

Steve ErkenBrack served three terms as Mesa County DA.

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Steve ErkenBrack hasn't taken the traditional route to head a health insurance plan.

ErkenBrack has logged more hours in the courtroom than in the corporate boardroom, with three terms as Mesa County district attorney, four years as Gale Norton's chief deputy state attorney general and many more as partner in private practice focusing on complex business litigation.

Now he's preparing to take the reins of Rocky Mountain Health Plans, a 34- year-old nonprofit health plan that has 178,000 members in the state, including HCA/HealthOne and PCL Construction.

ErkenBrack is already very familiar with Grand Junction- based RMHP, having served as the vice president for legal and government affairs for the past seven years. He will spend the next year working with outgoing CEO John Hopkins as part of the transition.

As much as ErkenBrack loves to litigate, he relishes the challenge of tackling the rapidly changing health care industry and working with Rocky's community-based model.

"One of the challenges in health care is going to be the changes going on over the next five to 10 years, not just for Rocky but the environment," he said. "You can't have a system where you tell the businesses, this particular item of overhead is going to go up 20, 25, 30 percent each year with no end in sight. That's something you have to address."

Public policy has been an area of intense interest for ErkenBrack throughout his legal career, said U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Timothy Tymkovich, who worked with him in the attorney general's office and later became partners in private practice.

"He understands the big picture and understands the problems of people and knows his community," Tymkovich said. "He brings those sensibilities and that perspective to one of the more important companies at an important time."

ErkenBrack, a graduate of the University of Colorado law school, was first exposed to RMHP as its attorney when he represented the plan in a $20 million Medicaid dispute in 1999. He won the case and, in the process, became intrigued by the health care system and Rocky's roots as a community-created health plan that lets Medicaid and Medicare patients see the same caregivers as every other patient.

ErkenBrack joined RMHP several years later to head legal and government affairs. Last year, ErkenBrack had a particularly intense immersion in government affairs as one of 27 members of Gov. Bill Ritter's Blue Ribbon Commission for Healthcare Reform. The legislature created the panel to study and recommend health care reform models to decrease costs and expand coverage to the state's estimated 800,000 uninsured.

ErkenBrack agreed to be on the panel because he felt that the health insurance perspective and Western Slope needed a representative.

"What I didn't anticipate was what I got out of it," he said. "I am now convinced that health care reform - to make it work in the real world - can't be driven by any one perspective.

"It's got to be something that, as you take a step forward, you listen to: How does this affect primary care doctors? Specialists? Nurse practitioners? Customers? The health plan? Home health care nurses?"

davisj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2514