Maine in the Driver's Seat

Nobody remembers Percy Garris. He’s the guy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” who hires Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s title characters to be payroll guards in Bolivia. On the way to get the payroll money Percy finds his two guards are overlooking one important point.
“Morons,” says Percy Garris, “ I've got morons on my team. Nobody is going to rob us going down the mountain. We have got no money going down the mountain. When we have got the money, on the way back, then you can sweat.”
Percy gets shot going back up the mountain.
We tend to forget this as we go through or daily life. When we get health insurance we tend to think we’re all set, we’re covered, we have our payroll guards. And as long as we don’t need insurance, the insurer is vigilant as to our health and well being, like Butch and Sundance going down the mountain. They remind us to get out blood pressure checked, to eat right, exercise, get plenty of rest…
They’re kind of like a Mom with her first child. You can’t be too careful with your first born. Make a claim and they become kind of like Dad with the second child, “haven’t we been through this before? What were you doing there anyway?” Get really sick, and they’re like a friend who owes you money.
Well, come to think of it, they’re more like Otter in National Lampoon’s Animal House, “you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You fucked up - you trusted us!”
The thing to remember is an insurance company doesn’t make any money by paying your medical expenses. They make money on the premium. Oh, there are actuarial tables, probabilities and all that, but what it comes down to is the premium. Everything else is an expense. It’s the same way with the health professionals by the way. Nobody gets paid for making you better. They get paid for treating you.
This means the insurance company wants you to stay healthy or if you become ill to either get better or die quickly. I don’t know that they have a preference for anything other than celerity. There’s no profit in anything else.
The doctor gets paid for treating you, not for curing you. I think the ultimate exercise of this option is psychiatry where people undergo “treatment” for decades. I’m not saying it’s not necessary, I wouldn’t pretend to know such a thing. I just wonder about something that is so open ended, but I digress.
What brought me back to all this, and has me darting about the verbal landscape like a squirrel on meth was Maine Senator Olympia Snow. Right now she’s got the White House and the Congress in the palm of her hand.
When Senator Snowe became the only Republican thus far to break away from the lock-step orthodoxy that the only good health care reform is no health care reform she made sure to let everyone know that she isn’t committed to staying out of step. That makes her the most powerful person in the congress – house or senate – on the health care issue. Do you want to bet that she isn’t the envy of every member of both houses and every governor in all the 50 states?
That, my friend, is the definition of power. To be the one swing vote on an issue. Does Maine need a hospital, a highway, a bridge, an airport? Now’s the time to ask. Right now Maine’s swing vote is the prettiest girl at the dance and she can probably get just about anything for one turn around the floor.
So what do you want, Maine? The time to worry about pork barrels is when some other state’s member of congress has the swing vote. Right now you could probably get congress to pay for an even up swap of Mount Katahdin for Mount Rushmore, you might as well go for it!