Remember how Gov. LePage vetoed a plan (five times) that would have expanded Medicaid to more people without health insurance?
Well a new report from an mental health care advocacy group says that decision has left thousands of Mainers without access to essential care.
Maine has 2,231 people with serious mental health issues who could have sought help under the expansion, according to federal data based on in-person interviews with 70,000 randomly selected people across the country, and compiled by the American Mental Health Counselors Association.
That’s a small fraction of the 568,886 people without care in 24 states that opted out of the expansion, the study says.
LePage has said that expanding the program would make private insurance more expensive.
“Previous expansions of the program have taught us that when we grow a welfare program like Medicaid, people will drop their private insurance and flock to government assistance,” he wrote to the legislature when he vetoed the expansion for the third time. “Maine has been down this road before, and we must learn from previous experience. Medicaid spending grew by one billion dollars in a decade, hospital bills were not being paid by the state, budgets were broken and thousands of elderly and people with disabilities were forced to wait for critical services.”
Check out the interactive map here. The PDF to the full report can be found here.
