I retired from teaching in 2018 for medical reasons – a cancer diagnosis. My benefits package included joining the Maine Public Employees Retirement System, with health insurance.

One of the givens of teaching is accepting lower pay than peers with equivalent degrees, but lower health insurance rates with excellent coverage to compensate – until this year. The urology practice I have used since 2017 has decided to drop Anthem Blue Cross. The letter patients received cited Anthem’s reluctance to negotiate in good faith.

Health care costs have increased significantly since the pandemic. Medical practices have been forced to deal with rising costs. Fore River Urology joined Maine Medical Partners and Intermed, facing a corporation focused on investors’ bottom line rather than subscribers. This is idiocy, and patently unfair to public employees.

Dividends to Anthem’s investors have increased, enjoying $1 billion-plus in 2021. I have developed a long-standing trust with my cancer doctors, which is difficult when facing multiple diagnoses. I owe them my life. Where is Anthem’s focus? Not on us.

Under CEO Gail Boudreaux, Anthem is also changing its name to Elevance Health, no doubt to shed the negative associations Anthem has accrued. It’s no wonder that she only enjoys a two-thirds acceptability rating among her own company’s customer care representatives on Glassdoor.com.

We have a Bureau of Insurance in Maine. Where is it? What is it doing? When does the state involve itself in ensuring health care providers are compensated fairly, maintaining the health of those who worked for promised benefits that we can’t even access?

Christine Caulfield
Yarmouth

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