If, indeed, Maine’s superintendent of insurance, Alessandro Iuppa, really wants Maine’s senior citizens to pay higher premiums for health insurance, he’s either dangerously demented or an out-and-out spokesman for Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Either way, he should be removed from his taxpayer-financed job before he can do any further harm to the people of this state.

It was Iuppa who unilaterally permitted Anthem’s foul-smelling takeover of Blue Cross and Blue Shield in the first place, and he’s wasted little time advocating this next step on Anthem’s money-lusting agenda. It strikes me that most senior citizens in Maine aren’t exactly living “the good life” now, already finding themselves having to decide between heating their homes and filling their stomachs, let alone dealing with Iuppa-approved or advocated spikes in their already-too-high health insurance premiums.

All that will be accomplished by this obscene recommendation is that senior citizens will be forced to drop health insurance altogether, which, I suppose, is what Iuppa and his friends at Anthem want.

The Maine Legislature had better say no to this one, and somebody had better do whatever has to be done to remove Iuppa from the public payroll. The idea that the state official who should be an advocate for the people of this state, especially those who have worked hard and paid for health insurance all their lives, is instead an advocate for a large insurance outfit that nobody wanted here in the first place is too incredible to be believed.

Maine has seen quite enough of Iuppa. As for Anthem, it’s already time for us to re-institute a nonprofit health insurance company – for the state, for the region, or even for the nation. Is it really necessary for the obscenely rich to become even more so? Wayne Miller Sherman Station