The following is an Excerpt from the Investors Business Daily article embedded a few posts down. It details the miserable failure of Maine's Dirigo Health plan.
Writing on our op-ed page last Friday, Kerri Houston Toloczko, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Liberty, gave quite an account of those states — including Snowe's Maine — where health care has been taken over by the government. All are a "mess," she says, but Maine's universal coverage takes the prize.
Rammed through in four weeks in 2003, so-called Dirigo Health was supposed to cover all of Maine's 128,000 uninsured by now. But six years after its passage, it covers just 3,400.
"By 2007," Houston Toloczko notes, "the system was so broke that it closed to new enrollees. It still has not reopened and has also cut and capped benefits. The 'streamlined' bureaucracy has cost the state's taxpayers $17 million in administrative costs to cover 9,600 people, leading one to wonder if there are more bureaucrats in the system than enrollees."
Systemwide insurance costs have increased 74%, Houston Toloczko also points out. And here's the kicker: Maine's plan is "the most similar to the plans circulating on Capitol Hill."
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