LOWER-COST HEALTHCARE

Our Most Critical Task: Lowering the Cost of Living and Doing Business in Maine

Maine’s cost structure is too high, period! No matter how many more millions of dollars we spend on economic development efforts, no matter how many state and local officials we send on trips across the country or around the world, we will not attract the kinds of businesses that will provide good jobs and higher incomes for Maine people until Maine becomes a less expensive place to live and to do business.

There are three big levers that we can use to do this – three steps that we can take that together can transform Maine’s economy. We must:

  1. lower the cost of electricity
  2. lower the cost of healthcare
  3. lower the cost of government

Here is my strategy to lower the cost of healthcare:

Maine Wellness – Lower Cost Healthcare for Maine

Maine’s rapidly rising annual expenditures for healthcare are crippling Maine’s working families, who pay too great a portion of their wages for healthcare, and are breaking the backs of Maine employers. High healthcare and insurance costs are one of the most important factors making it difficult to live and do business in Maine.

We can bring healthcare costs under control in Maine by ending Dirigo and MaineCare and providing essential health-care services for all Maine citizens through Maine Wellness, a new statewide framework within which coverage and care will be provided at a price that Maine businesses and taxpayers can afford, while preserving individual choice and the important relationships between patients and caregivers.

The Maine Wellness framework will be based on these three principles:

  1. All Mainers should have access to essential health care services.
  2. The program must be financially sound and sustainable.
  3. We will reward healthy behaviors and pay for healthy outcomes, de-emphasizing payments for procedures as much as possible, because many of the diseases we pay to treat are preventable.

Our program will borrow from the highly successful efforts undertaken by Cianbro, Hussey and other large Maine employers, who have succeeded dramatically in controlling costs and providing incentives for people to stop smoking, to lose weight and to take better care of themselves. Maine Wellness will be built on the foundation of Maine’s strong system of non-profit hospitals and committed physicians and caregivers.