Matt Yglesias

Anthem BCS of Maine Claims Constitutional Right to 3 Percent Profits

Igor Volsky reports:

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine, the state’s largest private insurer, is suing the state after Maine’s Superintendent of Insurance denied Anthem a rate increase that would have required Maine residents to pay an “additional $12 million in annual premiums for the same level of benefits.” Under Anthem’s proposed increases, the average policyholder would have had to spend “more than $13,000 in premium and deductibles, prior to becoming eligible to receive any health benefits under the policy.”

After reviewing Anthem’s annual rate increases for policies sold within the individual health insurance market, Maine rejected the company’s proposed rate increase of 18.9%, but allowed the company to “break-even” in its individual market division and increase “rates by just 10.9%.” According to court documents obtained by the Wonk Room, Anthem, a subsidiary of Wellpoint Inc., argued that beyond simply ‘breaking-even’, the government must guarantee the company a 3% profit.

I have to agree with Robert Waldmann that this sounds an awful lot like an insurance industry mole is trying to convince Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to support a strong public option. I’m not sure what other industry move I could imagine that would be more likely to have that result.

In other Maine political news, there’s surely some way that federal health legislation can be amended so as to resolve this herring issue. Basically, science indicates that Maine fishermen need to catch less herring. And herring is used to bait lobster traps. So cutting the herring catch will be bad for lobstermen and of course bad for those who catch herring. The whole thing is a big controversy important to a key local industry. But the actual dollar sums of money involved are almost laughably small:

A small fleet of Maine boats caught about $8.3 million worth of herring last year, according to state data. Most of the catch is sold as bait to the state’s $244 million lobster industry, while a smaller portion is used for canned sardines or other processed fish products.

In lieu of substantive policy concessions, if I were Harry Reid I’d be looking hard at what kind of $5 million herring bailout I could organize.

Maine Steps Toward Adopting Unicameralism

We have fifty states, but in some ways remarkably little institutional diversity between them. 49 of them, for example, have bicameral legislatures—a State Senate and a variously named lower House—even though nothing terrible seems to happen in unicameral Nebraska. Well, now it looks like the great state of Maine is taking some steps toward unicameral governance:

The Maine House today gave initial approval to a bill to create a one-body legislature. [...] The bill now heads to the Senate for consideration. If it passes both bodies, it will need two-thirds support on final passage and would go to the voters for consideration.

Maine is billing this as a cost-saving measure, but I think of it as a good governance measure. Most people in the United States suffer from being represented by more elected officials than they can actually keep track of. Only a small minority of the population can actually name their two state representatives. Cut that down to one, and you make it somewhat easier for people to inform themselves about what’s going on. At a minimum if you hear that “the state legislature” has done something bad, you can go look up who represents you in the state legislature and complain.

It’s hardly a silver bullet for the problems of state-level governance, but I think unicameralism will help.

Making a Good Health Care Plan Great For Maine

Steve Benen linked over the weekend to a Bangor Daily News account of an Olympia Snowe health care forum in which the Senator sounded very open to potentially far-reaching reforms:

“We have a totally dysfunctional system now,” she said. While like most Republicans she would prefer to see the private sector collaborate on an effective change, a government-run health care system may be the only way to get the job done, she said.

Ezra Klein observes that Snowe is a little bit lacking in the coherence department:

Snowe’s position is a bit of an odd one: She holds that we may require a single-payer system but probably should have a public insurance option. The next step, she says, is to fix the market. And Snowe argues that it’s not clear that you can do that with a public insurance option. She’s raised the possibility that the public plan is actually too easy on private insurers. It’s a government plan, she says, and every lobby and advocacy group will exert pressure for it to cover every ill, ailment, and treatment. As such, the plan will quickly prove a better deal for the sick than the well, and it will end up being the equivalent of a “bad bank” for health risks. The private insurance market will simply skim off the healthy. In other words, the public plan wouldn’t compete with the private market so much as subtly subsidize it.

I would say that the main thing in this sort of situation is to stop thinking about the big issues, and start thinking about little ones. How can you structure a health care program so as to be very beneficial to the state of Maine? It’s not genuinely the case that inadequate levels of subsidies to sparsely populated rural states are an important failing of the current American health care system. But with the two “most likely to swing” Republicans coming from Maine, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee coming from Montana, and the head of the Senate Budget Committee coming from North Dakota this is probably the shortest route between the status quo and major reform. The major question becomes whether or not significant, broad changes like a meaningful public option can be structured in such a way as to be appealing to these constituencies. Maine’s a weird state, maybe it needs blueberry subsidies or provisions that take into account the special needs of states with large seasonal swings in population.

Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins vs. Rush Limbaugh

This isn’t exactly profiles in courage material, but it’s good to see that not every Republican is taking her marching orders from talk radio. I do think this is worth peering deeper into, however:

Maine Republican Party Chairman Charles Webster, of Farmington, said Limbaugh has many admirers in Maine because “he speaks for a lot of working-class people” who are struggling to make a living.

Just to be clear, Maine exit polls show that the more money you have, the more likely you were to vote for John McCain:

In education terms, McCain’s best demographic was “some college” (though he lost that, too) and he did equally bad with those possessing a high-school diploma but no college, and those possessing a bachelor’s degree.

Maine 2nd CD

To return to a not-very-consequential pre-election dispute I had with Mike Crowley, it’s worth observing that John McCain was nowhere near winning Maine’s second congressional district. The only county he carried was Piscataquis, consistently the state’s most right-wing, but also one with barely any residents (Baxter State Park constitutes a huge proportion of its land area so it’s not just rural, a big part of it is genuinely empty) — there were a bit over 9,000 votes in the county this time, and McCain got 51 percent of them.

In the District’s main population center, Penobscot County, McCain got exactly his national average and the same was true of Waldo County. In Hancock, Aroostock, Franklin, and Oxford counties he did worse than average, and in Washington County he slightly outperformed. ME-2, in short, isn’t the bluest spot on the map, but it’s more liberal than most places.

ME-2

There’s an idea out there, propounded Michael Crowley (and again) that Maine’s second congressional district is a plausible enough target for the McCain campaign that it’s worth going after. And it seems that the campaign itself buys it, dispatching Sarah Palin to Bangor as the “campaign believes the moose-hunting Palin will connect with voters in a region where hunting, fishing and snowmobiling are popular.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in this district over the years and you can color me skeptical about this theory. The district is D+4 on the Cook PVI scale. It’s represented in congress by a Democrat and his predecessor was a Democrat. His predecessor was Susan Collins and her predecessor was Bill Cohen. That’s a classic New England political history of moderate Republicans giving way to Democrats. They may hunt moose, but there’s no tradition of Palin-style Christian conservatism playing here. And while the district is giant and includes vast backwoodsy expanses, it’s in the nature of these things that most of the district’s voters don’t live in the parts of the district where nobody lives. Bush carried Piscataquis County handily in 2004, which really is backwoodsy, but the whole county was responsible for fewer than 10,000 votes. In coastal Hancock County, people live in nice little towns, Kerry got 54.5 percent, and over 33,000 people voted. Most of all, I don’t see any particular reason to think that if McCain is going to do worse than Bush did in places like Ohio that it would make sense to think he’ll substantially improve on Bush’s showing in a place like northern Maine.