Maine’s health insurance system is under attack.

Is the Baldacci administration setting the stage for full-blown socialized medicine? Will Maine become the only state to implement a single-payer health care system? If you don’t believe that can happen, read on.

Proponents of a single-payer scheme have been laying the groundwork for years. They knew that a free people would resist full-out socialism, so they devised a strategy that would conceal their ambitions. If they could destroy Maine’s health insurance system, they could then ride to the “rescue” with socialized medicine, Canadian-style. That strategy has worked brilliantly.

Like termites undermining a big structure, they began their attack with the health insurance “reforms” of 1993. These have basically left our insurance market in shambles and made health insurance unaffordable. They drove out 10 or more insurance carriers and left us with only a few to choose from – and one of them, Anthem, holds 97 percent of the policies here. These reforms launched us into the insurance debacle we have today.

The primary culprits are the “evil twin” mandates of guaranteed issue and community rating. They typically add about 150 percent to the cost of a health insurance policy. Only five states still cling to these disastrous mandates. These same five states also have the highest insurance costs in the country. Our rates in Maine are often two or three times more costly than in other states – for identical coverage from the same insurance carrier.

The health care socialists don’t really care that Mainers face staggering insurance premiums. If they did care, they would get rid of those mandates. Instead, they hang on grimly to their failed policies and defend them like rabid wolverines. Keeping these policies in place keep them on track to reach their great dream – total collapse of Maine’s private insurance market.

Currently, many legislators are wrestling with the funding mechanism for Dirigo Health, the governor’s prized program to insure Maine’s 130,000 uninsured people (only 1,600 have been covered so far). That mechanism is the “savings offset payment” – money saved by Maine’s overall health system by reducing charity care and bad debt created by people who receive uninsured care. Maine’s insurance commissioner “pegged” last year’s savings at roughly $44 million.

But the insurance companies claim they have seen no savings, and thus are passing on this “Dirigo tax” to policyholders. A bill before the Legislature, L.D. 1935, would prohibit this pass-through and require the insurance companies to basically write out checks worth $44 million to Dirigo Health. The whole mess is now tied up in the courts. But if L.D.1935 passes, we could end up with no private insurance carriers in Maine.

Part Two of a coordinated assault on private insurance is an effort to potentially replace Anthem – the only company to bid on Dirigo – with a state-operated insurance entity. During the rollout of Dirigo in 2003, at a committee hearing, I asked Dirigo director Trish Riley about her motivation regarding the issue. She said, “We could become an insurance company. That is not our goal, but we could if we wanted to.”

Gov. Baldacci himself made reference to a state health insurance entity during this year’s State of the State address. We also have a full-blown study from a “blue ribbon commission” heralding the promise and desirability of a single-payer system. Now the move to establish a state-run insurance company is coming before my committee – Insurance and Financial Services – as a potential change in the law.

As the medical socialists push their agenda, we should remember that the state has already proven it cannot responsibly manage anything regarding health care. It already owes the hospitals $340 million, according to the Maine Hospital Association. The Department of Health and Human Services, a behemoth agency rife with personnel turmoil, cannot account for $130 million – they “lost” the money. The one socialized system Maine already runs – Medicaid – is a rat’s nest of problems so severe that many doctors can’t get paid and no longer accept new Medicaid patients.

Based on that record of incompetence, this bunch now aims to take over our health insurance business, we’d likely end up like Canada, where care is rationed or denied and waiting times are shockingly long. That’s why Canadians flock here for treatment.

Where would we flock to?

Surveys tell us that Maine working families simply want freedom of choice in reasonable and affordable health insurance, just as our New Hampshire neighbors enjoy. As a result of market-based reforms, most other states have significantly lower health insurance costs and better benefits than we do. It’s time for us to join with the majority of states in seeking meaningful reform – and abandon the utopian dream of socialized medicine.

As the only state providing “free” health care for all comers, we’d become a “medical magnet” for people badly in need of expensive health care – on our dime. We’re already the “sick man” of New England. “We can’t afford to become the “sick bed” for anybody in America.

As humorist P.J. O’Rourke said, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”

Rep. Mike Vaughan represents Durham, New Gloucester and part of Lisbon.

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