King’s revised budget eliminates health program cuts

Advocates for the disadvantaged rejoiced Thursday at Gov. Angus King’s plan to ditch most of his proposed cuts in physical and mental health programs in his supplemental state budget.

King’s new proposal, based upon a revised economic forecast showing $91 million more is available, wiped out almost every controversial health care cut.

The restoration in state funding also means an additional $30 million in federal Medicaid matching dollars will be available, if the proposal is approved. That money would go to the Department of Human Services and Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services programs.

Advocates were pleased Thursday.

“This is what we’ve been hoping for,” said Bonnie Brooks, chief executive officer of OHI, a Brewer-based community services provider to the mentally retarded. However, she said, the mentally retarded wouldn’t be out of the woods until the proposal becomes reality.

The only controversial cut King stands by is the planned $13 million to be taken from the Fund for a Healthy Maine. The program, paid for by tobacco settlement money, is intended to improve the public health and lower the state’s future health care bill. King is taking that money for the remaining budget shortfall even as he restores $33 million to the state’s emergency reserve known as the Rainy Day Fund.

The new proposal shortens a planned delay in efforts to get a federal waiver to allow Medicaid to extend insurance coverage to an estimated 16,000 Mainers who lack the coverage today. That funding will now be available in 2003, a DHS spokesman explained.

It restores money to community mental health and mental retardation programs. For instance, it will put back about $200,000 that was slated to be pared from social clubs for the mentally handicapped. These clubs offer the mentally ill and mentally retarded a place to get together to provide one another support and to socialize.

Carol Carothers, executive director of the National Association of the Mentally Ill, said her organization has been promised that its budget will be restored entirely. A proposed cut of $103,000 would have forced the group, which advocates for the mentally ill, to cut its staff in half, she said.

About 98 percent of its funding is from the state. NAMI has six employees who oversee 23 individual support groups.

Though pleased, advocates also said they had learned important lessons from the process under which the governor targeted programs for the poor.

Carothers said that she’d learned that having a strong coalition is important. She said mentally ill people came forward to put a human face on the cuts, while nontraditional players such as police chiefs and sheriffs joined advocates in protesting. Law enforcement officials told about the consequences of cutting off support to those trying to manage their mental illness.

Brooks said she too thinks groups must explain constantly what their programs are and what populations they serve. That’s even more important because term limits has increased the number of legislators who haven’t gone through the steep learning curve it takes to understand complicated programs such as Medicaid, Brooks said.

Brooks also said the government isn’t doing enough to explain the numbers in budget proposals. She said she’d be in favor of an independent state agency, like a general accounting office, that would provide more detail upon which legislators can base questions and decisions.

Sen. Ed Youngblood, R-Brewer, Rep. David Trahan, R-Waldoboro, and Matthew Dunlap, D-Old Town, have been among the legislators who have floated such an idea.