Last year (in 2025) Maine’s Bureau of Insurance held a public forum on whether or not health insurers should be allowed to increase their premiums by an average of over 20%. I spoke at that forum, and here is what I said:
“I’m glad to see some folks here from the health insurance carriers, and I know it’s been a while already so I really hope they’re still listening. I also hope there are a couple of lawmakers and policymakers from the State hanging around, as this all seems quite relevant to their work. And also in the future, I hope the insurance carriers will also limit their own presentations to three minutes apiece so that we can all save our time a little bit: it seems to me that they are just as much guests here as we are.
“That all aside, the money that the insurance carriers are asking for with these rate increases is money that does not exist on an individual/personal level in the state of Maine. You’re mentioning annualized premiums of $20,000, $24,000 but this is a state where the median personal income is still only about $40,000, and that’s just the people who actually earn wages, and before we even get into copays, coinsurances, and deductibles. These are insurmountable costs.
“We cannot continue, every time we go to the doctor, to not only pay for our doctors and their offices, but also pay for an insurance minion to tell us not to go, an extra clerk at the doctor’s office to argue with that minion, an insurance executive’s salary and new wig (or whatever it is they get in their “compensation package” aside from direct wages), a shareholder, and three lawyers. Every time we go to a doctor we pay for six to seven peoples’ time, only two of whom are actually trying to help us. We do not have the money to keep paying for them all.
“It needs to be the carrier’s responsibility to balance their own budget like the real grown-up businesses they allege themselves to be, and to every once in a while to show even a fraction of a spine and stand up to pharmaceutical and specialized technical companies who think that they can charge whatever price they want and the world will just turn belly-up and fork over. There is nothing left to fork.
“At this point it would probably be cheaper for the state to just pay people’s medical bills directly and cut out the middle-men. […] If insurance carriers cannot keep their businesses in order then Mainers will have to take our own place in the free market and innovate our own way out.”
The outreach coordinator for CoverME.gov called me afterwards to talk about some things, and one of the questions she asked me was what I would say to the Mainers who cancelled their health insurance plans this year because of the increased premiums. “There is nothing I can say,” I told her, “that would give them the $10,000 or more they’d need to afford health insurance this year.”
This is not a problem of people whimsically declining health insurance. It is a problem of health insurance being too expensive to buy.
Tristram J Howard 