Saxl bill aims to insure more Mainers

BANGOR – House Speaker Michael Saxl today will introduce a legislative package designed to increase access to health care in the state, where an estimated 180,000 people remain uninsured.

The Portland Democrat, who will officially unveil the proposals at an afternoon State House news conference, was in Bangor on Wednesday to give community leaders a preview of the legislation, funded in its initial form by a 50-cent-per-pack increase in the cigarette excise tax.

In pushing his plan, Saxl, a Bangor native, cited a dire need to provide uninsured and underinsured Mainers with coverage to prevent their inevitable medical costs from being absorbed by hospitals and passed on to those with private insurance.

“Can we do better?” Saxl asked at a morning meeting of the Action Committee of 50, a local group of civic leaders. “I don’t think we have any choice but to do better.”

Saxl said his plan would expand access to Medicaid coverage to eligible adults whose income is 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Access also would increase to parents or caretakers of children receiving Medicaid in households with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty line.

The legislation also would increase the eligibility for children in Maine’s Cub Care program from 200 percent to 300 percent of the federal poverty line. The change would provide insurance to another 12,000 Maine children, leaving only 4,000 without coverage, he said. Under the current system, 94 percent of Maine children are insured.

With Maine spending $4.7 billion on health care in 1999, Saxl said the Medicaid expansion was needed to infuse more matching federal money into the system and to help keep insurance costs lower.

But providing coverage for more Mainers will, of course, cost money, said Saxl, who proposed the 50-cent tax increase on cigarettes to bring in the needed $47 million in annual revenue.

The increase would bring the tax on cigarettes to $1.24 per pack, a price Saxl hoped would curb smoking, the effects of which are responsible for between $60 million and $96 million of Maine’s Medicaid costs.

Gov. Angus King, who earlier this year proposed a tax increase on tobacco products to help offset an estimated $253 million deficit, had not yet seen Saxl’s legislation, according to King spokesman John Ripley.

“We’ll take a look at it,” Ripley said Wednesday. “But the governor has his own plan to improve access to health care. I think they’re just coming at it from different ways.”

Two weeks ago, King indeed released his own health care initiative, called the PACE plan, standing for prevention, access, cost containment and empowerment.

To increase access, King proposed spending an additional $200 million for Medicaid during the next two years and creating public-private partnerships to fill gaps in health insurance coverage.

Among his proposals, King also looked to increase the cigarette excise tax by 26 cents to $1 per pack, noting that cigarette consumption had dropped 17 percent since 1997, when the Legislature doubled the tax to 74 cents. The estimated $36.4 million in resulting revenues under the King plan would be put into the general fund, Ripley said.

With recent news that the state will face an additional revenue gap of $46 million, some at the State House have speculated that the governor might propose another increase in the cigarette excise tax to help make up the difference.

Ripley said Wednesday that the administration was “looking at a number of options to plug that hole.”

Saxl said Tuesday that he believed his plan had a better chance at making it through the Taxation Committee, which had indicated that it would support only a cigarette tax that went directly to improving access to health care, he said.

In related legislation, Saxl said that he would propose a plan in coming weeks to revamp the private insurance industry. The bill, still under review, would create a state subsidy to assist insurance carriers with catastrophic losses in hopes of stabilizing insurance costs in Maine and make private insurance affordable for small businesses.