In his letter of Nov 19, Tom Bulger added a mildly amusing twist to a tired old script which, as usual, was remarkable for what it did not say.

First, he stopped short of naming even one other country to which he would gladly emigrate to take advantage of its cheap and efficient health care system. At least he avoided the trite “rest of the developed world.”

Second, he piled on those evil insurance companies for shaking us down and killing people in the streets. He forgot to mention that in the early 1990s, the Legislature imposed a set of “reforms” on the health insurance industry in Maine: guaranteed issue, no refusing pre-existing conditions, one price fits all. Sound familiar? It should to anyone who is paying a little attention to what’s happening in Congress. Most insurance companies packed up and left and the remaining few homogenized their policies and started hiking premiums every year to pay for those goodies.

Third, he implied the “public option” will heal all ills. The omission? Here in Maine, we have this scheme under the name Dirigo Health. It has been an incredibly expensive failure, by any definition of that word except, of course, the governor’s. In one way, it has been a rousing success: It killed off what little competition remained from the earlier reforms.

The pirate twist is very apt. The American taxpayer is walking the plank and the sword at our back is held by Congress and the Obama administration.

Michael LeBlanc, East Wilton