Updates on Health Care, Maine Budget

How are the Democrats going to pay for THIS? There are new estimates out this morning that the total cost of health care in the U.S. will double in the next ten years to over $4 trillion in 2017, or 20% of GDP. That will be over $13,000 for every man, woman, and child. Nearly half will be paid by federal and state governments--make that taxpayers. Using just my fingers, I arrive at an average public subsidy of $6,500 per person. And that's without universal health coverage.

Blame baby boomers like me. We'll be eligible for Medicare starting in 2011, when all hell will break loose. According to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, "Medicare, on its current course, is not sustainable." Leavitt's boss, President George W. Bush, actually has some good ideas in his 2009 budget about how to begin to deal with the problem. But all that "political capital" that he said he earned from his reelection in 2004 got spent somewhere else.

Solution: get healthier. Start now. Do it for yourself and for your fellow taxpayers.

Maine is in for some belt-tightening. This we knew, and the Legislature's Appropriations Committee will be reviewing the gory details today, one day after the Revenue Forecasting Committee upped the projected shortfall for 2007-2008 to $190 million. Among the proposed spending cuts: a 5% reduction in the "Clean Election" money made available for publicly funded state legislative candidates, which would save the taxpayers almost $300,000.

You know what that might mean? That might mean fewer lawn signs cluttering our highways and byways this fall. That might mean fewer campaign flyers in our mailboxes from Democratic and Republican offices in Augusta (you know, the stuffers that we don't look at anyway because they spout the party line, not the candidate's nuanced views). In the end, it might mean less landfill. Can we handle that?

As a candidate for the House District 93 seat, I am relieving the taxpayer by funding my campaign privately. Perhaps that makes me an "Unclean" candidate, but I am not convinced that public money is best spent on campaign paraphernalia. There are channels of communication available to candidates today that allow them to run on a shoestring. An example is this blog, which Google is enabling at no cost to me.

So vote dirty. Elect Bill Hine.