The Bangor Daily News is to be commended for the excellent week-long series of columns on the future of health care in the United States.

Perhaps, as you editorially suggest, a single-payer system is the only viable alternative to the present system, which is universally acknowledged as being too expensive and very inadequate. But, to immediately conclude that a single-payer system will be governmentally operated may be unnecessarily premature. The track record of governmentally operated social service systems is not without blemish.

In Maine we have an instance of a governmentally operated social service system which is certainly less than optimal, the Maine retirement system. It is a system which has an incredible unfunded liability, a billion-dollar liability which does not bode well for its future. It is a system which has regularly been exploited by some of its user institutions to its detriment (think of the way some school committees have recklessly exploited it to give unreasonably high retirement benefits to favored administrators). It is a system which has been regularly “raided” by the legislative and executive branches of government in their quests for so-called balanced budgets (the constitutional amendment passed by the voters a couple of years ago to protect its assets only momentarily slowed Augusta politicians in their attempts to extract the system’s assets for their purposes).

Do we really want this state government to be in charge of an insurance system which must carry reasonable reserves to insure the availability of benefits (for the population of Maine they reasonably might be more than $200 million)? …

Wouldn’t government better assume a PUC-type regulatory role in supervising a nongovernmental single-payer health-care insurance company? Currently, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine provides health insurance for almost half of the people in this state. If we are to have a single-payer system wouldn’t we be better off having a company like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine to operate it, regulated like we currently regulate public utilities? … William L. England Bangor