Maine Letters and Opinion

LTE: Poll of Mainers confirms what we know about health care

May 31, 2023

In a May 27, 2023, letter to the editor in the Portland Press Herald, Michael Bacon of Westbrook discusses the results of a recent survey commissioned by Consumers for Affordable Health Care about Maine voters’ . . . read more »

Op-ed: Reimagining our relationship to soaring medical costs

April 28, 2023

In an April 25 Maine Voices column in the Portland Press Herald, retired physician David Scotton suggests a thought experiment to better understand how single-payer health care financing would work. “Our society is now being . . . read more »

Op-ed: ‘Publicly funded health care is the answer’

April 23, 2023

Maine AllCare volunteer Dan Bryant, a retired physician from Cape Elizabeth responded to a recent opinion piece on burnout and moral injury in health care, and how a simplified, publicly funded, universal health care system . . . read more »

Emphasis on revenue “sabotages” medical practice

April 10, 2023

In an April 9, 2023, opinion piece in the Portland Press Herald, Deborah Patten, M.D. of Bath lays out how our profit-driven system “sabotages” medical practice. “At some point, most of us who entered medicine . . . read more »

Op-Ed: Seven deadly health care misunderstandings

November 23, 2022

In an opinion piece by Michael Bacon of Westbrook published in the Portland Press Herald on November 2, Bacon reflects on what he learned while collecting signatures for a campaign to get universal health care . . . read more »

Sept. 2022 Newsletter: Medicare Advantage

October 4, 2022

Medicare Advantage: Digging Deeper In our June newsletter we focused on problems associated with Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs), ACO-REACH, and Medicare Advantage, how these programs threaten traditional Medicare, and stories of people who’ve suffered because . . . read more »

LTE: Facility fee bill only a stopgap

September 19, 2022

Letter to the editor by Larry Kaplan, M.D., MPA, published in the Portland Press Herald on September 7: Facility fee bill only a stopgap—Maine needs universal health care  

Op-Ed: How to remove obstacles to universal health care

September 19, 2022

In a September 10 Maine Voices column in the Portland Press Herald, Dan Bryant, MD, offers a prescription for “How to remove obstacles on our path to universal health care.”  Bryant notes that “’stopgap’ changes . . . read more »

Maine Voices: Let’s tell elected officials we value, expect universal health care

September 10, 2022

In an August 30 Maine Voices column in the Portland Press Herald, Debra Dunlap of Gorham notes the rapidly growing number of people turning to GoFundMe to pay for health care in the U.S., where, . . . read more »

LTE: Profit has no place in health care

September 1, 2022

In a letter-to-the-editor published by the Portland Press Herald on August 27, Maine AllCare board chair Karen Foster responded to recent articles by reporter Joe Lawlor highlighting the “byzantine” system of medical billing and how . . . read more »