Seacoast Online | Sen. Hill critical of LePage plan to slash Medicaid funding
There’s no doubt that Maine’s Medicaid system, called MaineCare, needs to be scrutinized in detail. The dispute arises over whether 65,000 Mainers need to be removed from the system or whether there is some other alternative.
That’s the two sides of a coin being debated right now in the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, as members are asked to lop off $221 million in Medicaid funding from the two-year budget that began last July and continues through June 2013.
Locally, the pinch will not be felt as much as it will be in other parts of the state. York Hospital President Jud Knox said Medicaid patients make up about 7 percent of the hospital’s patient load, and the loss to the hospital would be around $1 million out of a budget of around $140 million.
However, Gov. Paul LePage does plan to cut funding to non-hospital residential group homes for the mentally ill, and this will include the home on Woodbridge Road in York run by Counseling Services Inc.
The governor unveiled his plans earlier this month, announcing the Department of Health and Human Services is already borrowing future money to pay for MaineCare and the account will be broke by April 1 if nothing is done.
He proposed cutting coverage for childless adults and those age 19 to 20, among other groups, and cutting coverage for services not federally required including dental, physical and occupational therapy and vision services.
All together, he has said these amount to $221 million, an amount he said is necessary to make the program solvent. The Appropriations Committee last week held public hearings on the plan and heard from hundreds of Mainers who would be affected.
State Sen. Dawn Hill, D-York, the Democratic lead of the Appropriations Committee, said she has yet to receive from DHHS an accounting of how it arrived at the $221 million figure. “That figure has not been verified and it should have been before we went any further,” she said. “We were told, ‘We have an emergency. We have a crisis,’ but we still do not have confirmation of that number.”
In hearings last week, Christopher Nolan of the Legislature’s Office of Fiscal and Program Review said he “could understand” how DHHS arrived at the number. But he went on to say that when he looks at the shortfall from the perspective of all DHHS funding sources, “there does not appear to be the same magnitude of shortfall.”
LePage maintains the $221 million shortfall is real and a responsible Legislature will accept the cuts he’s proposed, no matter the difficulty with the issue.
“There are two choices,” LePage said in his weekly radio address last Saturday. “We can kick the can down the road, steal money from other departments to pay for our Medicaid bills, or we can take a hard look at the program and restructure it so it’s a reliable safety net.”
Hill said she has another proposal. “This is not a strategic solution,” she said. “What we need to do is get some people in there to go down through the groups and see who needs to stay on, who’s marginally eligible, who’s fraudulent. That’s what needs to happen. Not a wholesale cut.”
Hill is not alone in her concerns. State Rep. Windol Weaver, R-York agrees “the governor went too far.” “This is an extreme package. The governor is not going to get everything he wants,” said Weaver, who watched the public hearings online and called the stories of Mainers who testified “heart-wrenching.”
He said he was particularly concerned that the residential group home on Woodbridge Road is targeted for closure if the governor’s plan goes through. The home has been in operation for decades, and its residents “are part of the community.”
Moreover, said Weaver, employees at the home will likely lose their jobs.
Knox said it’s important for those in the York Hospital’s patient area — all of southern York County — who are on MaineCare to know the hospital and its physicians will still see them. “We’ll take care of them. We’re not going to have insurance coverage, but we’ll take care of them,” he said.
York Hospital, however, has the smallest MaineCare population of any hospital in the state. As the immediate past president of the Maine Hospital Association, Knox said he’s concerned about the impact on the rest of the state’s hospitals, some that will see the loss of tens of millions of dollars.
“I understand that the state budget needs to be brought into better balance, but these kinds of cuts should be looked at more broadly, not just within MaineCare,” he said.