Christopher Williams leads his recent piece with “Baldacci wants to provide health insurance for 180,000 uninsured Mainers.” In reality, Baldacci wants to do much more. He wants to totally socialize health care in the state of Maine.

I am pleased to see the Maine Hospital Association is sticking to its guns and not caving in to Baldacci.

Baldacci wants the hospitals to bring out the meat cleaver and start hacking. Baldacci calls this a “voluntary” program.

The MHA is saying, essentially, we ain’t playing the bad guy in this for you, governor. If you want to kill rural Maine hospitals and ruin health care in Maine, you do it – yourself.

Global budgeting, where Baldacci prepares the hospitals’ budgets for them, is pure socialism. There is no other way to polish it up.

Baldacci is rushing this to a vote this month. Will our local legislators vote to support degraded, socialized Maine medicine?

Robert D. Stone, Lewiston