AUGUSTA, Maine — Republicans in the Maine Senate on Tuesday shot down a bipartisan short-term budget that aims to fill a $118 million shortfall in the state’s Medicaid program, with the move risking delays in payments to health care providers.
It capped a dysfunctional five weeks in the State House over a document that was mostly uncontroversial when it was proposed by Gov. Janet Mills in January. Republicans turned on a version that was endorsed last month by three of their budget negotiators. Since then, lawmakers have whipsawed between votes and closed-door talks on the subject.
The four party leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Trey Stewart, R-Presque Isle, hammered out a bill Monday that included new limits on General Assistance. House Republicans approved it overwhelmingly, but Stewart and his caucus voted it down, withholding the two-thirds margin to enact the spending package immediately.
“We did get some reforms that were moving the ball in a positive direction,” Assistant Senate Minority Leader Matt Harrington, R-Sanford, said of the bill on the floor. “But unfortunately, it did nothing to address the Medicaid system in this state.”
The Senate adjourned in uncharacteristic silence after Republicans withheld the votes to pass the budget. Its timing remains a problem, since the money earmarked for health care providers will not go into effect until June.
The state said it would start Wednesday to withhold payments to them and cap or delay other payments before the state money is freed up to fill the deficit for the MaineCare program that serves more than 400,000 low-income Mainers. The state’s plan includes slashing smaller payments and not paying claims of more than $50,000 until the budget takes effect.
Senate President Mattie Daughtry, D-Brunswick, told reporters after the vote that she would call lawmakers back this week to finalize a budget, saying Republicans in her chamber “flipped” on Mainers.
“They showed that they could walk away from a compromise that had been negotiated in good faith,” she said.
Mills’ short-term budget, which is separate from her controversial two-year proposal that hikes spending by $1 billion while raising taxes and cutting certain health programs, included limits on the ballooning General Assistance program that would limit recipients to three months of benefits per year. But legislative Democrats wary of that change set it aside for consideration later this spring.
In talks over the past month, Republicans argued for restoring those changes and making other tweaks. The governor brokered talks over the past two weeks that resulted in the compromise attempt presented Tuesday by Daughtry, who made a point in a floor speech to say all the party leaders agreed to the deal on Monday.
The new proposal would limit General Assistance per recipient to 12 months in a 36-month period, force the Mills administration to give out a 1.95 percent cost-of-living adjustment that lawmakers previously approved for direct care workers and provide for a third-party review of waste, fraud and abuse in the MaineCare program.
Daughtry said there were many elements of the proposal that she would not have authored herself, imploring her colleagues to provide certainty to health care providers and the forest products industry that would benefit from $2 million aimed at fighting the spruce budworm.
“I didn’t run to not be able to do our job, to not be able to deliver for the Maine people,” she said.
In the afternoon, Stewart gave a brief speech praising the amendment along with two other members of his party. The bill initially passed in a 31-2 vote, then House Republicans enacted it in a surprisingly strong 113-27 vote. But all Senate Republicans except for Rick Bennett of Oxford and Marianne Moore of Calais opposed the budget in the end.
In an interview, Stewart said he agreed Monday to bring the bill back to his caucus. This morning, he said he told Daughtry and Democrats that they only had two votes from his caucus. While House Republicans were more focused on General Assistance, he said his members wanted structural changes to Medicaid.
It was clear that there is bad blood in the State House, where Democrats effectively have just a 78-73 advantage on Republicans in the lower chamber. The minority party is angry after Democrats stripped Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, of her voting privileges following a censure for social media posts about a transgender high school athlete. She sued Tuesday over that.
Amid the supplemental budget talks, lawmakers have already started hearings on the governor’s two-year, $11.6 billion budget plan facing pushback from the right and left due to mixing tax hikes with cuts to social services and health programs. The strife over the short-term deal makes it likelier that Democrats will pass a two-year budget without them this month.
“This is the new normal,” Stewart said of simple majority budgets like that.
