Nine state legislators are asking the office of the Maine attorney general Monday to provide funding for Penobscot Community Health Care, which needs an immediate $3 million boost to avoid drastically cutting services or declaring bankruptcy.
The letter, which state Sen. Joe Baldacci, D-Bangor, shared with the Bangor Daily News, requested that Attorney General Aaron Frey allocate $1 million from his office’s share of opioid settlement funds to Penobscot Community Health Care for its transitional housing program.
If Frey fulfills the request, it could help keep afloat a healthcare provider that is considered a safety net for low-income Mainers amid a shortage of primary care physicians and a homelessness crisis in Bangor.
The transitional housing program is operated at the same site as Penobscot Community Health Care’s Hope House low-barrier shelter, which is operated by the nonprofit Preble Street, and its medical clinic for people who are homeless.
“This integrated model exists precisely because the population it serves — Mainers experiencing chronic homelessness — is disproportionately affected by opioid use disorder, co-occurring substance use, and mental illness,” the legislators wrote.
The transitional housing program offers people temporary, dorm-style housing while they search for more permanent living arrangements. A typical stay lasts about six to eight months, PCHC president and CEO Lori Dwyer said previously. An expansion, funded by pandemic relief money, is underway.
Participants can get on-site addiction treatment, primary and behavioral health care, naloxone, peer recovery support, and help finding permanent housing, according to the lawmakers. The program serves nearly 100 people per year, nearly all of whom are affected by opioid use disorder or substance use disorder, either directly or through a family member.
“This is precisely the kind of evidence-based, housing-plus-treatment strategy that public health researchers and the settlement guidelines themselves identify as an effective opioid remediation approach — stable housing is not incidental to recovery, it is foundational to it,” lawmakers wrote.
Penobscot Community Health Care “has carried this program’s losses for years by subsidizing it with revenue from elsewhere in the health center, but that is no longer sustainable given the financial pressure the organization is under more broadly,” the lawmakers added.
Penobscot Community Health Care has several health clinics in the Bangor area and beyond, serving patients regardless of their ability to pay. Healthcare organizations in the region have warned of dire consequences to an already-fragile network should the provider have to reduce its services.
“PCHC really serves as a safety net for about 50,000 patients in [the] Penobscot, Waldo and Hancock County area, so this is a pretty important issue that we all need to spend some time trying to make better,” Baldacci told the BDN.
The group of lawmakers alluded to those worries in their request, saying it was “one piece of a larger effort to stabilize PCHC so it does not face an abrupt closure of this program and the displacement of the vulnerable Mainers it currently houses.”
Baldacci said he’s had a relationship with Penobscot Community Health Care for years, particularly in the last year or two “because of reductions at the federal level as well as the cost of healthcare in general.”
He expects that strain on healthcare providers will worsen next year because of Medicaid cuts that will go into effect as a result of the Trump administration’s funding package. Those cuts will hit providers like Penobscot Community Health Care especially hard because “they serve primarily low- and middle-income Mainers,” making them more vulnerable to government reimbursement rates compared with many other hospitals, Baldacci said.
“We’re held back because we’re not adequately funding the reimbursement levels at either the state or federal level,” Baldacci said.
Opioid settlement funds would stabilize staffing for the housing program, which is “currently held to a bare-bones ratio to keep the doors open,” the lawmakers said in their letter.
State and local governments in Maine received those funds as part of nationwide litigation against pharmaceutical companies for their roles in the opioid epidemic. Twenty percent of Maine’s funds — about $17.2 million so far — went to the attorney general’s office, and about half of that has been spent. Most of the office’s funding awards have gone toward the Department of Health and Human Services, the Maine Monitor reported.