Even in a time of budget surplus, the money Maine will receive as part of a nationwide settlement with the tobacco industry is more popular among legislators than nicotine patches at a quit-smoking clinic. Fortunately, how the money is to be spent already is in statute, with the proper emphasis on health care. The Maine Center for Economic Policy has offered a cost-effective plan that both is needed and meets statutory guidelines.

Prevention and cessation of smoking properly will head the list of programs that the $55 million annual payment, but that still leaves plenty of money for other health-related programs. The center’s research on the subject shows the problem of a lack of health care coverage among the working poor to be growing despite improvements in the economy. The problem is nationwide, but is especially bad in Maine, which has the highest percentage of working-poor parents in New England.

Approximately 26,000 Maine working parents with incomes below 200 percent of poverty lack health coverage. The reasons they lack coverage is well-known — insurance costs are rising as the state’s economy is losing manufacturing jobs, which usually include benefits, and adding service-sector jobs, which often do not. The problem is not going to go away and probably will get worse.

Maine during the last several years has done well in extending health coverage to children, using a combination of state and federal programs to pay for it. The center, through its report called Within Reach: Health Coverage for Working Families, proposes doing much the same for parents. With $4 million annually in tobacco funds, the state could leverage another $8 million in federal money and insure 10,000 parents whose incomes equal less than 150 percent of poverty, or about $21,000 a year for a family of three.

Maine has compelling humanitarian reasons for wanting to do this, especially as the changing dynamics of the health-care business cut off much of the charity care once quietly provided by hospitals and other institutions. But it also has a practical interest in proving coverage: Generally, people who do not have health coverage do not get preventive care and end up sicker, at greater expense to the state system, than they otherwise with insurance. That means lost work time for businesses and lost family time for children. It is difficult to attach a dollar figure to these losses, but they are real and keenly felt by those depending on these uninsured adults.

The tobacco settlement gives Maine the ongoing resources to do something about this. The center’s proposal is hardly a cure for all the ailments in the health care system, but it would provide crucial coverage to working Mainers truly in need.