Charging any premium

Has Maine’s superintendent of insurance, Alessandro Iuppa, outlived his usefulness as a public servant? Is it not enough that insurers are allowed to charge any premium they wish of the ill elderly who retain individual insurance past age 65?

Maine is a state that claims it does not have the funds to serve much more than 40 percent of those people in Maine who fully qualify for its three programs to aid those without health insurance: low-cost health insurance to families of children serves 11,000 families (27,000 families fully qualify); a similar proportion of people in need are served by a low-cost prescription program; and Medicaid of those who fully qualify.

The message already is: “Die and be quick about it.” (right out of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”). Re: the catastrophically ill – Chellie Pingree admits – we (the Legislature) never intended to help the catastrophically ill. Those of us with 80 percent of income consumed by just medication at $23,000 a year; or with all savings expended and $116,000 a year as one Bucksport couple with blindness, diabetes, heart problems and a rare blood disorder, who are told they don’t qualify for low cost prescription program or Medicaid. Another transplanted co-worker of my husband has $10,000 a year more expense than we do for my husband’s medication – or about $33,500 a year. Or a heart transplanted man we know whose medication exceeds all of the couple’s income by 125 percent or more.

This year, the only year there is certainty as to where my husband’s medication is to come from our insurance premiums will consume $10,000. We have Cobra for 18 months starting last June 1 because my husband worked past age 65. A 1998 Supreme Court case made Cobra function as it had been intended to for 25 years and didn’t.

Is chronic illness not punishing enough without a superintendent of insurance proposing to heap coals on the heads of the ill? Lucille L. Soper Bucksport