Nice try, Democrats.
Nice try, Democrats.
D emocrats think they can finally beat Senator Susan Collins — and they’re betting that health care is key to victory. Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, recently announced that she’ll challenge Collins in the 2026 midterm election, and she and her fellow Democrats wasted no time criticizing the Republican for jeopardizing people’s access to care. But Mills should think twice, because talking about health care could cause voters to realize how much harm she’s done to her own state.
In announcing her candidacy (joining a primary field that includes the controversy-courting Graham Platner), Mills declared that she’d fight Collins and President Trump for “rip[ping] away health care from millions of Americans.” It’s likely a reference to their work requirements for able-bodied adults on Medicaid and their support for letting Joe Biden’s expanded Obamacare subsidies expire at the end of the year. The state Democratic Party doubled down, attacking Collins on the subsidies issue while saying that Mainers depend on the extra taxpayer help.
These partisan jabs have no basis in reality. The Medicaid work rules require able-bodied adults without young children to find gainful employment and the private coverage that comes with it, keeping them insured. As for the Obamacare subsidies, Democrats promised they’d be temporary during the pandemic, and once they expire, people at 150 percent of the poverty line will still be able to find zero-deductible Obamacare plans for less than $15/week.
What does have a basis in reality is that Maine is suffering because of Janet Mills, as my colleague Hayden Dublois shows in a new paper.
When Mills was first elected to the governor’s office in 2018, she inherited a well-functioning health care system. Her predecessor, Republican Governor Paul LePage, had issued a series of reforms to stabilize the state’s individual market and expand access to affordable coverage, starting in 2011. Within a year, Maine’s largest insurer lowered its premiums by 70 percent. Even after Obamacare went into effect, Maine’s premium hikes were among the lowest in the nation.
But instead of preserving or building on this progress, Mills has rolled it back to the detriment of Mainers. In 2023, she secured a federal waiver from the Biden administration to merge the state’s individual and small-group health markets. She promised this move would prevent brutal premium hikes, but her action destabilized the complicated world of risk-pool mixing and reinsurance payments.
Within a year of the market merger, the average enrollee saw premiums spike by about 14.5 percent. They rose another 9.3 percent in 2025, and heading into 2026, they’ll rise between 17.5 percent and 23.9 percent. Before Mills’s foolish action, Maine had the 36th-highest average premiums in the country. Now, it has the seventh highest, showing how Maine has fared much worse than states with better leaders. It’s conceivable that the state cracks the top five in the next few years.
Nor do Mainers have an easy escape route. In her first year in office, Mills signed a law to restrict access to affordable short-term insurance plans. These plans typically cost far less than Obamacare coverage — 66 percent less for a 40-year-old woman living in the state capital, for instance. By pushing people into Obamacare, Mills raised costs for many Mainers.
She also raised costs by mandating price parity for telehealth services in 2019. Before, patients could save money by using these virtual options, but Mills forced insurance companies to reimburse telehealth providers at the same rate as in-person providers. That necessarily raises premiums, since it means paying more for telehealth than it may actually cost.
Mills could have undone some of this damage by enacting positive reforms, but time and again, she refused. She didn’t support legislation over the past five years to exempt Farm Bureau plans from costly state regulations, a move that would have lowered premiums for many Mainers. Nor did she back any of the dozen-plus bills in the state legislature to reform the state’s onerous “certificate of need” law. Essentially, many health care providers must get bureaucratic approval before building new facilities or expanding existing ones. Yet research shows that this red tape raises the cost of health care by at least 5 percent. That’s real savings for Maine residents who are paying so much more than the national average in insurance premiums, but Mills had no interest in giving them relief.
Today, Maine’s individual health care market is in free fall, but it didn’t have to be this way. All Mills had to do was keep the reforms that her predecessor passed, while expanding on them in commonsense ways. Instead, she turned back the clock and rallied around more government mandates and control, and higher prices inevitably followed. Maine is suffering, alright. But it’s not the fault of Senator Susan Collins or any other Republican. If voters are looking for someone to blame, the better culprit is their own Democratic governor, Janet Mills.