An emergency spending bill failed again in the Maine Senate on Thursday as Democrats and Republicans continued to clash over MaineCare spending and other welfare programs.
The ongoing partisan deadlock has already delayed payments to hospitals and other health care providers. It also threatens millions of dollars aimed at preventing a destructive infestation of spruce budworm in the commercial forests of northern Maine.
For the second time in three days, most senators supported the $121 million stopgap spending bill. But it didn't pick up enough Republicans to muster the two-thirds majority needed to take effect immediately.
With the bill now dead — on paper, at least — Democratic and Republicans leaders said they will have to decide on options for reviving the bill. Without super-majority support in both chambers, the bill would not become effective for at least three months, thereby further delaying MaineCare payments.
"It didn't get over the threshold here — we were two votes short," Senate President Mattie Daughtry, D-Brunswick, told reporters after the flurry of unsuccessful procedural votes. "But if you look at the majority of the elected body of both the House and the Senate, the majority of members said, 'We believe in this. We believe in in coming together and delivering for Mainers.'"
The bill aims to close an estimated $118 million shortfall in MaineCare in the fiscal year that ends on June 30. State officials have attributed the shortfall to a combination of factors, including rising health care costs and higher utilization rates of the Medicaid program since the pandemic.
On Wednesday, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services began withholding or delaying payments to hospitals, pharmacies and other health care providers because of the shortfall. Hospital officials warned that the delayed and reduced payments will only exacerbate the financial strain faced by some facilities.
The weeks-long stalemate over the budget has cast a partisan cloud over the State House during the first months of the 2025 legislative session.
Democrats, including Gov. Janet Mills, have accused Senate Republicans of moving the goalposts and not negotiating in good faith on an emergency budget to pay the state's bills.
"The refusal of Senate Republicans to support the bipartisan agreement on the supplemental budget is harmful for Maine health care providers and their patients," Mills said in a statement on Thursday. "Providers have said loudly, and clearly, that this stalemate is endangering their finances and will impact care for vulnerable people all around our state. Yet instead of paying hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care providers what they are owed, Senate Republicans have put them at even greater risk.”
But Senate Republican leaders have accused Democrats of refusing to even discuss longer-term changes to reduce spending on MaineCare and other welfare programs, particularly General Assistance. They have repeatedly called attention to the enormous disparity between GA spending levels in Portland — some of which has gone to house and support recently arrived asylum seekers from other countries — and in smaller, rural communities throughout the state.
Assistant Senate Republican Leader Sen. Matt Harrington of Sanford said he did not receive any calls or emails from Democratic leaders to talk about a compromise during the month between the first vote on the supplemental budget and recent attempts to pass the bill.
"I find it really unfortunate," Harrington said. "We have made it very clear over the last month of what it would take to get us to a two-thirds vote."
The stalemate also threatens to delay the state's $2 million contribution to efforts to fight a looming outbreak of spruce budworm. Forestry experts argue they have a relatively narrow window during which they can spray a pesticide to dramatically reduce populations of the budworm, a native insect that has already caused massive damage in neighboring Canada and that devastated millions of acres of forests in Maine during the last cyclical infestation in the 1970s and 1980s.
The latest version of the bill includes several changes accepted by Democrats in order to win Republican support. For instance, Democrats agreed to limit housing vouchers within the state's general assistance program to 12 months within a three-year period. That provision isn't as stringent as Mills had originally proposed but Democrats saw it as a compromise that would give people using the vouchers more time before losing housing assistance.
The proposal also includes cost of living increases for direct care workers that were supposed to kick in this January but that the Mills administration proposed eliminating in order to save money. Some nursing homes, group homes and hospitals say they already raised workers wages in January, consistent with the state's earlier policy, and have urged the state pay its share.
Those changes were sufficient to win the support of House Republican leaders. The House voted 113-27 to enact the bill on Tuesday. The Senate initially voted 31-2 to advance the bill earlier that but the budget then failed in a subsequent vote when nine Republicans changed their votes.
Two Republicans, Sens. Rick Bennett of Oxford and Marianne Moore of Calais, joined with Democrats to support the current compromise on Tuesday and Thursday. But House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, blasted their GOP colleagues for their votes.
“Earlier this week, there was a 31-2 vote on the proposal negotiated by legislative leaders," Fecteau said in a statement. "For Senate Republicans to now sink this budget based on a litany of excuses is the very definition of twisting oneself into a pretzel. They should have stood by the 31-2 vote, followed the strong bipartisan support in the House, and sent the supplemental budget to the Governor's desk.”
The early-session partisan flare-up is also likely to affect the more complicated negotiations over the more than $11 billion, two-year budget that begins on July 1. Lawmakers are facing a projected budget shortfall this year for the first time in more than a decade. And Mills has proposed cutting spending in some programs — particularly within DHHS — while increasing the tobacco tax. Failure to enact a state budget by July 1 would cause a government shutdown.
Republicans have said that they are negotiating hard on the MaineCare and GA changes during the supplemental budget because they do not trust Democrats to work with them on the two-year budget.
"We made it very clear that we are not going to bail out a welfare program that is failing . . . without fixing the underlying problem," Harrington said in a floor speech. "The compassionate thing to do here, if we care about the many people on MaineCare, is to fix it so that it is there for the truly needy, so that it is there for the developmentally disabled and new mothers. That's what we should have done. And yet we find ourselves here playing a game of chicken."
