$13.5M taken from DHHS

BANGOR – Gov. John Baldacci’s announcement Tuesday of nearly $38 million in General Fund reductions hit a nerve among Bangor-area providers of mental and behavioral health services. More than $13.5 million of the governor’s “curtailments” will be drawn from the biennial budget of the Department of Health and Human Services, with much of the impact falling on agencies that provide services to individuals not covered by MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program.

“I have a constitutional duty to balance the budget,” Baldacci said at a press conference in Augusta. “Today’s order will make sure that obligation is met while also protecting our state economy and the vital safety net for Maine people.”

But at Community Health and Counseling Services in Bangor, Executive Director Joseph Pickering said the cuts are just the latest of many such actions taken by the Baldacci administration that have eroded services to Maine’s poor.

“This has been happening for the past six years,” he said at a gathering of area providers in his office Tuesday afternoon. “It’s a consistent pattern of cutting community services, of focusing on community services, largely because the [clients] are vulnerable and have little political power.”

Pickering and others at the meeting said it was too soon to tell exactly how the cuts would affect their agencies, but they agreed that greater cost-saving measures should be sought within DHHS itself before forcing private agencies to cut back on or eliminate services to Maine people with mental illness or mental retardation.

Baldacci and DHHS, supported by “the silence of the Legislature,” are protecting state jobs “with tragic consequences for the people of Maine,” Pickering charged.

Dale Hamilton, director of adult, child and family services at CHCS, said people who don’t have access to the care they need often end up in hospital emergency rooms and jails.

“What kind of thinking has gone into understanding the impact of these changes?” he asked. “What are [Baldacci’s] plans for meeting the needs of these individuals?”

Trish Niederowski, executive director of the nonprofit agency Wings for Children and Families, said the cuts will affect many mentally ill children who are not covered by MaineCare, forcing them and their families to go without the support and counseling they need.

“We know that early entry into the [mental health] system can prevent more costly care down the road,” she said, such as hospitalization and placement in institutional care. Niederowski said it’s not unusual for families to discover their children are eligible for MaineCare coverage once they start receiving support services with the non-MaineCare funding that’s being eliminated.

Kay Carter, special projects manager for CHCS, said other cuts appear to eliminate outpatient counseling for adults with “severe and persistent mental illness” who do not qualify for MaineCare. Many of these individuals have only slightly too much money to qualify, she said, while others have applied for coverage and are awaiting notification of acceptance. Others lose MaineCare when they go to jail or are hospitalized, she said, and are too dysfunctional to reapply without the very assistance they’re being denied.

Rhonda Keyte of Allies Inc. said her agency helps people make the transition from jails and shelters to more stable living conditions. “Now where will they go?” she asked.

In a telephone interview, Bonnie Brooks, president and chief executive officer of Hermon-based OHI, said the latest changes could spell disaster for vulnerable Mainers who rely heavily on services such as supported living, case management, individual and group counseling, and supported employment.

OHI is a private, nonprofit agency that provides such services to about 600 mentally ill and mentally retarded children and adults in Greater Bangor.

Brooks also serves as chairwoman of an advisory panel for the community consent decree representing about 800 former residents of the Pineland Institute for the mentally retarded. Pineland, which was located in New Gloucester, has been closed for many years, but the consent decree remains open as the state attempts to comply with its demands for adequate community-based services. A similar case remains open for former patients of the Augusta Mental Health Institute.

The cuts announced Tuesday, Brooks said, and additional reductions likely in the next legislative session, will erode the state’s ability to meet the needs of all Mainers with mental illnesses and mental retardation. Brooks predicted that DHHS will start seeing grievances filed on behalf of former residents of Pineland and AMHI, whose needs, by law, must be met.

“This is a pivotal moment,” she said Tuesday. “We are right in the center of a change that could very well spell out the decline of the state’s ability to provide essential services.”