AUGUSTA, Maine - Opioid abuse treatment providers in Maine are calling out the LePage administration for failing to pursue federal dollars to expand access to treatment.
On the heels of Gov. Paul LePage saying this week that he'll bring in the National Guard to fight the opioid abuse epidemic, providers say the state recently walked away from a potential multi-million dollar grant.
The grant was announced in March by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA: up to $1 million a year for three years, for 11 grantees.
Brent Miller of the Discovery House in Bangor says Maine was a prime candidate. "It would have provided much needed resources to meet the needs of the many hundreds if not thousands of people waiting to get into treatment."
Miller says at the Discovery House wait lists for methadone treatment run a few weeks. For Suboxone, it's months. A Portland attorney who represents a coalition of methadone providers - Jim Cohen - says the lack of access to treatment is a crisis.
"It's important to understand that, in the case of methadone treatment, which has approximately 4,000 individuals in treatment, even though the need has been growing over the last number of years, the patient census has been flat-to-slightly-declining, in part due to cuts in the MaineCare program," Cohen says.
Providers are struggling too, Cohen says. In recent years, the state cut reimbursement by 25 percent. So now, Cohen says, providers are paid rates below what they were receiving in the 90s. "That's created a crisis in the clinics to be able to continue to provide the services to Maine people."
These are the reasons, providers say, that Maine should have applied for the SAMHSA grant that would help increase access to treatment. But Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson David Sorensen says Maine has to strategize when choosing grants. "We can't apply for every one," he says. "Applying for a grant is a process that requires a lot of staff time."
And for this particular grant, Sorensen says, Maine's chances seemed slim because it only met one of two sets of priority criteria. But a spokesperson for SAMHSA said that three out of 11 states awarded grants also only met one of the two sets of priority criteria.
But, says Sorensen, there's another important point to consider: "DHHS has funding available to reimburse providers for addiction treatment of the uninsured."
Where Maine lacks funding, says Sorensen, is in enforcement and interdiction. "That's a major problem. The governor has said repeatedly our capacity to deal with the supply-side threat of heroin coming into the state is not where it needs to be."
But both attorney Jim Cohen and the Discovery House's Brent Miller say there isn't enough money for opioid addiction treatment - and they say clinics have never been made aware of state funds to treat the uninsured.
