Healthy debate to start
If health care is truly our top concern, Thursday will be a banner day at the State House.
Tomorrow, Gov. Baldacci’s long-awaited health care reform measure officially goes before lawmakers for review and debate.
The legislation has been both hailed as a solution and dismissed as a cure worse than our chronic inadequate health care illness.
The governor has argued that we can’t afford not to adopt his Dirigo Health plan. Others say we can’t afford to embrace it. No matter how tense the clash, it is almost certain reforms will emerge by the end of the current legislative session and we just cannot afford to stand on the sidelines and say nothing.
The Dirigo plan will rein in the certificate of need process, but hospitals oppose new restrictions.
The plan will tap taxpayers to subsidize premiums to private insurers for those who cannot afford insurance, which tax reform backers oppose as a new and very expensive tax.
The plan will cap the amount providers’ can bill patients for service, which doctors and hospitals oppose.
The plan will also guarantee health care coverage to every Mainer – employed and unemployed – within four years. No caring person could oppose that.
This private-public plan has been pitched as a first-in-the-nation concept but it’s been tough to pin the administration down on the details. Lawmakers are ready to do that.
The governor has invited input, believing that the real solution to the health care crisis demands a group effort. He’s right. This invitation to participate must not go unanswered. There is not one person in Maine who will fail to reap the benefits of reform or escape its costs.
A healthy Maine
Tobacco settlement funds were awarded to states to mitigate the lasting damage inflicted by tobacco use. That doesn’t make them tax dollars.
We are at a point where we need a constitutional amendment to do the right thing: protect perpetual settlement funds for the purpose for which they were won. If we don’t, we will spend away the Fund for a Healthy Maine, turning our backs on the very arguments that wrestled the settlement away from Big Tobacco.
Gov. Baldacci has proposed an amendment that would guarantee the funds would be used for disease prevention, health promotion and access to health care programs. The money would never be used to balance the budget.
The governor is not alone in wishing to protect this money. Public opinion polls have been overwhelmingly supportive, which is enough proof for representatives to approve the concept by the necessary two-thirds majority and pass it along to voters for approval in November.
Maine was once able to proudly say that we used more settlement funds for their intended purpose than any other state. We have used so much of that money to offset the growing deficit that we can no longer say that’s true.
And that’s wrong.
A constitutional amendment would guarantee the steady raid on the Fund for a Healthy Maine would permanently stop.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com
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