This is hard to swallow.

If lawmakers had held public hearings about raising taxes on beer, wine, soda, flavored water and even health insurance transactions in order to help pay for the Dirigo Health insurance program, they would have gotten a mouthful from Maine consumers tired of being taxed too much.

But they didn't.

Instead, the majority Democrats passed those tax increases late Tuesday night, with little to no public input. Gov. John Baldacci signed the measure into law on Wednesday afternoon.

Consumers -- who will be hit with a 54 cents per gallon tax on beer, 65 cents per gallon tax on wine, 42 cents per gallon tax on soda and a 1.8 percent tax on all claims paid by health insurance companies -- didn't get a chance to make their views known.

The unfortunate vote came on a bill to bail out the financially shaky Dirigo program.

That proposal originally relied on an increase in tobacco taxes, which raised the hackles of smokers, but few others.

While that original bill, sponsored by Rep. Hannah Pingree, D-North Haven, would have passed the House, it ran into trouble in the closely divided Senate.

That's where Sen. Nancy Sullivan, D-York and co-chairwoman of the Insurance and Financial Affairs Committee, dug in her heels.

"We just can't keep going after cigarettes," she said. "We've raised it too much."

With Dirigo slated to run out of money by next February, supporters of the program were pretty much stuck. Either find another way to fund it that would make the notoriously stubborn Sullivan happy -- or watch it run out of money.

So they unearthed an old (and justifiably ignored) proposal to pay for Dirigo with liquor and soda taxes. Under cover of darkness, they passed it.

Along with the dramatically increased taxes on beer, wine and soda, the legislation also allows the state to use $5 million in tobacco settlement money to prop up Dirigo and to borrow $3.6 million from the General Fund for its support.

Dirigo Health was a noble experiment meant to provide low-cost insurance for Maine's growing population of the uninsured.

But the noble experiment has not met its promise: Far fewer people than projected have signed up for Dirigo and it is not, as yet, able to pay for itself.

One key aspect of its financial support, called the Savings Offset Payment, has been mired in legal challenges.

And as all its problems became apparent, the program became a political football. Democrats defended the program -- a signature initiative of Baldacci -- and Republicans pounded on it as a failed experiment in socialized medicine.

If the Democrats wanted to hand Republicans a great issue going into the 2008 election, they've just done it. We can hear it now: "Paying more for your beer and wine and soda? Blame the tax-and-spend Democrats and vote for Republicans!"

There may very well have been strong arguments to be made about the need for sin taxes on liquor, flavored water and soda in order to fund the expansion of low-cost health insurance in Maine. But sadly, those arguments were never made in a public forum. The public couldn't respond to the proposal. And the result was a last-minute tax increase foisted on Maine consumers.

In the old days, that was called "taxation without representation."

We're waiting for someone to organize a mass dumping of beer, wine, flavored water and soda into the Kennebec.