During the weekend I sat to do my taxes online, the first time in a few years I had done so. I did it thinking I could save the cost of having someone else do it for me.

With our son Pat visiting for Easter, we encouraged him to bring his tax info up and we would all sit around the table. During this exercise I both ran into having to show I had healthcare insurance and watch Pat as he had to deal with only having had eight months of insurance in 2015. This made me think of how we got here in terms of penalizing people for their health-care choices and why we could be fooled again by government saying they were here to protect us.

Ronald Reagan famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'” I believe as funny as that sounds it is an important warning as well.

I served for two years on the Maine Health Exchange Advisory Commission (http://www.maine.gov/legis/opla/reportsnew.htm see 2014 list #3). The commission had three Democrats, two Republicans (including me) and 13 people involved in various areas of health care. It would be fair to say many on the commission would see benefits to their organization if Maine brought an Obamacare Exchange to Maine. In fairness, I was able to “pick the brains” of some on the commission to help some of you.

I was on the Maine Legislative Insurance Committee when we voted to not open an exchange at first chance. Many of us on that committee saw that it would make more sense to let other states set these new exchanges up to learn from their mistakes. It is clear there have been many mistakes.

Obamacare’s goal, as I remember, was to give insurance to 50,000,000 Americans who did not have insurance. Factoid to file away for another day…having insurance is not necessarily having health care. The government approach to Obamacare, as I remember, was to create a website and to hire (a lot) of IRS workers (to count all the monies).

That is how government starts a health-care program, would you do it that way? Doctors and nurses would seem to be important to me. It is apparently impossible to learn the cost of the Obamacare website but ranges I have seen are $860,000,000 to over $2,000,000,000. I put the zeros in for effect. My web designer friends shake their heads as they suggest they could have done that website for (a lot) less.

Perhaps I am compelled to write this to you, the reader, given my son’s taxes but as well because during the committee process of two summers we heard regularly by conference call from Washington, telling us all was going well and no issues were seen.

We also heard almost as regularly from the new exchange in Kentucky, which was viewed as a success story for early health exchanges. This past weekend, I saw an article that discussed the closure and failure of health exchanges nationwide. Yes, Kentucky was on the list of failed exchanges. I understand most were funded with money that was to be paid back to the federal government.

There is a (real) fear now that the monies are lost. This weekend we also saw Maine’s largest Obamacare provider, Maine Community Health Options, say they would be raising rates since they lost (a lot of) money last year. Insurance appears to be much more expensive now.

In closing, government may be here to help but has no incentives to do it well. When mistakes are made, no one is fired…the taxpayers simply pay more. Obamacare has helped some people, but others have been hurt. I would suggest Obamacare simply changes winners and losers.

Last year Maine government also added $330,000,000 more to our state budget. That’s a lot of zeros. Can you say your life is better given this spending? Given the above resources that have been spent in just the past six years, I am very reluctant to vote for government to do anything more than look at the funding it has and do better. You can help by voting in November for others who will be willing to do that hard work.

This article was not ghost written. I wrote it! Contact me at mmcclell@maine.rr.com.

Rep. Mike McClellan represents House District 66, parts Raymond, Casco and Poland.