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Emily Hill is a family medicine physician and former Mabel Wadsworth Center fellow who lives and works in Maine.
As a physician who grew up in Hermon, I have been concerned about healthcare in Maine. Today I ring the alarm bells again.
Maine Family Planning (MFP), a significant healthcare resource for rural Mainers, from Rumford to Fort Kent to Calais, is at risk of closing because the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are holding them hostage. The “Big Beautiful Bill” won’t allow federal tax dollars to reimburse the primary care and family planning services MFP provides, simply because one of the services they provide happens to be abortions. These federal dollars would not reimburse the cost of abortions. Mainers’ lives — and our own taxpayer money funding our very own healthcare — are being dictated by politics.
Health, however, is not political. Being a Republican or Democrat doesn’t define what illness or cancer you get. We, as healthcare providers, take an oath to treat every person who walks through our door to the best of our ability, regardless of their beliefs as a patient. We don’t decide who gets treatment or not. Nor do I want politicians deciding which Mainers receive healthcare or not.
I am calling for state leaders to sustainably fund Maine Family Planning, a critical organization in our state’s fragile healthcare infrastructure. MFP received a one-time allotment of funding in 2025 from the state Legislature that helped fill the gap left from these harsh political maneuvers. However, without continued sustainable funding, rural Mainers’ access to high-quality healthcare is going to get worse.
Maine Family Planning and its network serve nearly 30,000 Mainers annually, most of whom live rurally and wouldn’t otherwise have access to healthcare. Half of their patients have MaineCare. Twenty-two percent have no insurance at all. MFP is often one of few healthcare offices that actually take patients on short notice without a months-long wait.
They also offer more healthcare services than most people realize. They provide preventative and reproductive healthcare, including cervical cancer screenings, chronic disease prevention, STI screenings, preconception counseling, breast exams, birth control services, among others.
For example, MFP is the only clinic in Knox County performing colposcopies — a potentially life-saving procedure that diagnoses cervical cancer for women with abnormal pap smears. It is not performed at any other healthcare facility in that county. Until Oct. 31, they also provided primary care in several rural towns, including Presque Isle. They provide the kind of care that keeps Mainers healthy and able to go to work — a major factor acknowledged by a recent report on economic inequality in Maine.
If you think this doesn’t affect you, consider that without the kinds of services MFP provides, many patients will likely need to visit already overflowing emergency rooms for simple care such as STI screening, birth control refills, or pregnancy tests. Waitlists for primary care providers (PCPs), already long, are about to grow longer. Lack of access to STI screening places rural Mainers at higher risk of serious infections that might require hospitalization or contracting HIV.
Maine Family Planning is many Mainers’ only source for preventative care, meaning future cost savings and less burden on our other health systems today and in the future. Patients seen at MFP are treated by trusted and skilled physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants who know how to take care of Mainers, regardless of their political affiliation. MFP, as efficient and effective providers of primary and preventative care to rural Mainers, is an important part of the rural healthcare infrastructure that complements the larger institutions in the state.
MFP deserves sustainable funding, as some lawmakers have very recently proposed, so all Mainers can continue to have access to this kind of healthcare, no matter where they live. If we truly care about providing healthcare to rural Mainers, let’s ensure that the organizations who are already doing it well can continue to do their job.
