Healthcare advocates from across the state and corrections officers from Charleston warned the Legislature Monday that proposed funding reductions would decimate the social safety nets they provide.
Medicare patients seeking primary care and non-violent offenders soon to be released from prison would suffer, they said, though most conceded that cuts are unavoidable in light of a growing revenue shortfall.
Sen. Bill Diamond (D-Windham), chairman of the Committee on Appropriations and Financial Affairs, said after Monday’s hearing that an estimated $832 million gap predicted between revenues and the cost of current services for the next two years will grow.
“It’s going up,” he said. “I suspect we’ll soon be talking about a figure that’s closer to $1 billion.”
The Revenue Forecasting Committee and Consensus Economic Forecasting Commission will meet in early February – three months sooner than scheduled – to update their projections based on holiday sales, employment, and income data. By then, if the wishes of Legislative leaders are met, the $140 million in cuts being debated this week in Augusta will be on the books.
Reducing Medicare payments to hospitals that employ doctors, which is called for as part of a plan developed by Gov. John Baldacci and his staff, would dampen an already troubled effort to attract doctors to Maine, said healthcare executives and advocates. That, in turn, will create a shortage of doctors who are willing to accept MaineCare and Medicare patients.
“Anything that creates a negative effect on physician’s salaries will worsen a problem we already have,” said Dr. Edmund Claxton, Jr., a family physician at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. Claxton was one of numerous medical professionals who testified against these cuts and others on Monday.
At Mount Desert Island Hospital in Bar Harbor, which President and Chief Executive Officer Art Blank said is already suffering from negative operating margins, this cut would cost more than $150,000 a year. That’s on top of another proposed cut targeted at MDI Hospital and 15 other critical access hospitals in Maine, which are subject to another proposal in the budget plan. Together, these two reductions will cost Maine hospitals almost $13 million in state and federal funding.
Blank said the double impact on smaller hospitals will result in programs that lose money being cut.
“I find it abhorrent and utterly incomprehensible that people in our rural areas who happen to be sick should be targeted for this new tax,” he said. “I would urge the Legislature to quickly reject this proposal from even the slightest consideration.”
A proposed $10,000 reduction in funding for the National Alliance on Mental Illness-Maine is small in comparison to the cuts to hospitals, but the effect will be harsh regardless, said Executive Director Carol Carothers, especially following $140,000 in state funding cuts last year that reduced NAMI-Maine’s staff from nine people to five. Part of the organization’s function is training volunteers to run support groups throughout Maine.
“We are truly bare-bones,” Carothers said. “Everyone has taken on additional responsibility. There is nowhere else for me to cut. We’re really just keeping our phone open and lights on.”
Prisons
Also discussed Monday was a proposed list of cuts in the Department of Corrections, which Commissioner Martin Magnusson said exacerbates, “the most tough-to-manage budget I’ve ever seen.”
In addition to cuts in leadership training, case management, and pre-release activities, the supplemental budget calls for the closure of one of two units at Charleston Correctional Facility. Department-wide, 25 positions will be cut, 15 of them from Charleston.
Correction officers who work there painted the facility as a place where soon-to-be-released inmates learn valuable life skills and prepare for their freedom through community service. They’ve also been given responsibilities such as processing firewood to stoke the institution’s wood-fired boiler system. The 45 affected inmates would be moved to county jails.
“Why are you cutting at this end?” asked Chad Curtis, a Charleston employee whose job is not at risk. “This is the end where we’re getting something out of the prisoners. We’re taking the cream of the crop and sending them to county jails and basically just warehousing them.”
Sen. Debra Plowman (R-Hampden), whose district includes the facility, toured it last week and decided to testify in its favor Monday. “These (inmates) are working,” she said. “Some of them are paying their room and board. They’re paying fines. They’re heating the place. They’re learning how to earn a living. I beg you to find another facility that does as much on so little.”
Sen. Douglas Smith (R-Dover-Foxcroft) also toured the facility and testified on its behalf, as well as in support of the employees who would lose their jobs.
“I can tell you that the loss of these 15 jobs in a labor market which already has 9.1 percent unemployment, according to the latest report from the Maine Department of Labor, is significant,” he stated in written testimony.
Sen. Diamond said after the meeting, that it was valuable as a learning opportunity, but said he doubts major changes will be made to Baldacci’s supplemental budget bill, given the much larger problems that lie ahead.
“It’s difficult to make a lot of changes in this supplemental, historically speaking,” he said. “Education is going to be huge because it deals directly with people’s property taxes.”
The Dept. of Education’s budget is scheduled for debate Tues., Jan. 6, along with the budgets for the Depts. of Labor and Economic Development. Those hearings were scheduled to begin at 9 a.m.
On Wed., Jan. 7, beginning at 1 p.m., the budget hearings will conclude with debates on numerous budgets, including those involving natural resources, financial matters, veteran’s affairs, the judiciary and the Legislature itself.
The Legislative committees have scheduled several committee workshops next week to discuss final language for the budget, which leadership hopes to pass in January.
(Statehouse News Service)