Wealthy Former Hospital Lobbyist Defends Collins’ Poor Record on Health Care

PHOTO: Susan Collins with former Maine Hospital Association President Steven Michaud

Last week, Senator Susan Collins released a new ad featuring a wealthy former hospital lobbyist praising the five-term Senator’s record on health care. During his career, former Maine Hospital Association President Steven Michaud pulled in $600,000 a year lobbying on behalf of hospitals but not always in the patient’s interest. Over the years, the Maine Hospital Association (MHA) has lobbied against various bills to require safe nurse patient ratios in hospitals and control the skyrocketing cost of health care among other pro-patient reforms.

MHA’s national affiliate, the American Hospital Association is a health care industry trade group representing nearly 5,000 hospitals and health care providers across the country. It has also been a major impediment to making health care more affordable. It allied with health insurance companies to kill Medicare for All; sued the U.S. government to stop it from requiring hospitals to make their prices public; and even fought against providing free care to low-income people who lack medical insurance.

The AHA also lobbied against bipartisan legislation to reduce healthcare costs by requiring Medicare to pay the same price for the same health care service, whether it is provided in a hospital facility or a doctor's office, rather than pay twice as much for services provided by hospitals. In addition, the AHA has vigorously defended monopolistic hospital consolidation and resisted President Joe Biden’s efforts to more aggressively enforce anti-trust laws to prevent bad hospital mergers that harm patients.

Meanwhile, Maine’s per capita spending on health care increased by at least 120 percent between 2001 and 2020. Hospital expenses in Maine have skyrocketed by more than 160 percent, according to the 2024 annual report from the Maine Office of Affordable Health Care. The United States spends an estimated $5.3 trillion on healthcare, approximately $15,474 per person. This is roughly twice the average of other wealthy nations and 2.5 times the overall Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average. Federal actuaries project total healthcare spending will reach $9 trillion by 2034, representing over 20 percent of the U.S. economy. When asked in March why this problem has not been fixed, Michaud told the Maine Monitor that it’s impossible to control costs.

“It’s not a solvable problem. The affordability crisis is not solvable,” Michaud said. "And by the way, I challenge anybody to look across the globe. Nobody has solved it."

That's just not true. All you have to do look at how much the U.S. spends on health care compared to other countries:

Michaud's comments show how unserious the hospital industry is about making health care more affordable for working-class people. Other countries control health care costs by price setting, aggressive fee negotiations with medical providers and strict budget caps. But Michaud and the Maine Hospital Association have fought efforts to cap health care costs, while the American Hospital Association has joined health insurance corporations and Big Pharma to defeat the most effective way to bring down health care costs: Medicare for All.

A Medicare for All-type single payer health care system uses a single public agency to streamline administration, negotiate lower prices, and set uniform budgets. This results in lower administrative costs because it eliminates the need for massive billing departments to deal with multiple private insurance companies as well as marketing expenses and high executive compensation.

By allowing the government to become sole buyer of prescription drugs it would give patients the use that powerful leverage to negotiate standardized, lower prices for prescription drugs and medical equipment. The country of Taiwan, where I lived for several years, has a health care system modeled on our Medicare system, but it expands this national coverage to everyone, not just the elderly, disabled and very low-income individuals. As a result, health care accounts for 6.2 percent of Taiwan’s GDP, about a third of what the U.S. spends with our corporate health care system. Health care can be affordable if we eliminate the profit motive and focus more on care rather than boosting profits for health care corporations and pay for hospital CEOs.

That’s why Troy Jackson supports Medicare for All, while Collins prefers to keep the status quo, while voting to advance bills that eliminate funding for hospitals and coverage for low-income people, forcing them to rely on free charity care for emergencies. Hospitals don’t just eat these costs. They get transferred to the rest of us through higher insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. By resisting implementing a national health care system to control costs we are cutting off our nose to spite our face. So when you see corporate health care lobbyist Steven Michaud TV on your screen lavishing praise on Susan Collins, understand that his interests are not yours when it comes to making health care more affordable.