A business coalition organized to fight recent tax increases intended to support Maine’s struggling program to provide state-subsidized health care coverage says it has gathered nearly double the number of signatures needed to put a repeal measure on the November ballot.
The Fed Up With Taxes coalition delivered more than 90,000 signatures Tuesday, July 15, to the Maine secretary of state, far more than the roughly 55,000 required to put the repeal initiative on the ballot. The secretary of state has until mid-August to review and validate the signatures.
“Voters from all over the state eagerly signed our petitions because Maine families are struggling in this difficult economy. This is absolutely the worst time to be raising taxes,” Newell Augur, the coalition’s chairman and head of the Maine Beverage Association in Portland, said in a statement.
The new taxes replaced a controversial assessment on health insurers that hasn’t come close to providing the revenue needed to fund DirigoChoice, the state-subsidized program offered to individuals and small employers.
The taxes included a first-ever Maine tax on soft drinks, a doubling of existing levies on beer and wine, and a 1.8 percent tax on health care claims paid by insurers and third-party claims administrators.
State officials earlier said the new taxes would generate roughly double the revenue of the previous assessment on insurers, while the amount collected would be more predictable. The previous assessment had been linked to savings achieved by insurers, which were expected to save money because providers were projected to shift less uncompensated health care costs to insured patients as more people had coverage.
But fewer than 13,000 people now have coverage through DirigoChoice, a fraction of initial state enrollment projections.
If voters approve the tax repeal, the assessment on insurers would be restored.
Filed by Jerry Geisel of Business Insurance, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.
