Medicaid funding fix fails final votes in Senate with Republicans maintaining opposition

Senate President Mattie Daughtry presents her amendment for the supplemental budget on the floor on March 11, 2025. (Photo by Emma Davis/ Maine Morning Star)

The bill to address the funding shortfall for the state’s Medicaid program, MaineCare, died on Thursday after the Senate again fell two votes short of securing enough support from Republicans to pass it as an emergency. 

The legislation aimed to fill the $118 million MaineCare budget shortfall the state is facing in the current fiscal year. Republicans refused to back the change package unless it included structural reform to the program, too. 

The state started to withhold payments to health care providers on Wednesday, after the Legislature’s now weeks-long impasse, and the inability to reach agreement Thursday leaves the timeline to resume full payments unclear, and farther away. The total $121 million supplemental budget bill would have also provided funding to treat a growing outbreak of spruce budworm, a destructive insect that threatens Maine’s northern forests. 

Technically, a vote with two-thirds of support could revive the bill out of the dead file, but Senate President Mattie Daughtry (D-Brunswick) said in a press conference Thursday afternoon that she does not see that as a viable option given the upper chamber consistently falling two votes short of that threshold.

Lawmakers are now looking at drafting a new bill to balance the state’s budget for the remainder of the current fiscal year. Floor speeches on Thursday indicated separate bills may be used to address the other initiatives the package had attempted to include.

“I’m not going to rule anything off the table,” Daughtry said of what the next iteration of a change package could look like. “But I will commit to continuing to have those conversations, not only with Republicans but also with the governor and with Maine people as well.”

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said in a statement that Senate Republicans’ opposition has harmed Mainers.

“Providers have said loudly, and clearly, that this stalemate is endangering their finances and will impact care for vulnerable people all around our state,” Mills said. “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.”

The human and environmental costs at stake in Maine’s Medicaid funding battle

Senate Republicans were not available for comment Thursday afternoon. 

Heading into the Senate session on Thursday, the only option for a final outcome on the supplemental budget was for Senate Republicans to get on board with the amended version already passed by two-thirds of the House of Representatives. The 35-seat chamber needed 24 votes to pass the measure as an emergency and it only received 22.

If the Senate had attempted to amend the plan further, the bill would have had to be sent back to the House, which is not scheduled to meet again until Tuesday. 

This past Tuesday, Daughtry introduced an amendment workshopped behind-the-scenes that incorporated enough Republican demands to gain the initial support of the minority party, including limits to General Assistance that Mills had initially proposed, cost-of-living adjustments for certain essential support workers withheld by the Mills administration, and a review of MaineCare for fraud, waste and abuse.

While House Republicans maintained their support for the amendment in floor votes, all but two Senate Republicans refused to back the measure in the final enactment vote.

In floor speeches on Thursday, Maine senators tried to highlight what’s at stake for their constituents in this budget battle. 

Democrats talked of the immediate needs the emergency legislation seeks to address — payments to health care providers that have already started to be withheld, resulting in limited services for the largely low-income and older Mainers who rely on the program, and an impending outbreak of an infectious insect threatening Maine’s forests.

“I hear legislators saying this budget does nothing for their district but if you have either spruce trees or people on MaineCare in your district, this budget absolutely helps them,” said Sen. Cameron Reny (D-Lincoln). 

Emphasizing that the measure is one primarily aimed to fill gaps, not make policy, Sen. Joe Baldacci (D-Penobscot) said there are no new taxes and it will use money from a surplus the state already has. 

“It is to pay bills that we have incurred,” Baldacci said. “The supplemental budget should have been a no-brainer for all of us… There was no need to manufacture a crisis.”

Sen. James Libby (R-Cumberland) focused his objections to the items tacked onto the plan as a compromise, arguing that the additions don’t change anything for his rural district.

For example, he noted that the limits to General Assistance won’t change the overall funding model of the program, which provides most allocations to the state’s largest city, Portland. 

While Libby said that the sustainability of MaineCare is a complex issue requiring more work than can be accomplished with this one package, he argued that the study proposed in the amendment is not a sufficient start. 

“All I ask for would be any minor change in that expansion line, any minor change,” Libby said, referring to the Medicaid expansion approved by Maine voters in 2017.  “I swear if it was 1%, less, you’ll have my vote because I’m not leaving here with some kind of study.”

Assistant Senate Minority Leader Matt Harrington (R-York) reiterated his caucus’ stance: “We are not going to bail out a welfare program that is failing.” On Wednesday, the Senate GOP issued a statement explaining that the majority of their caucus won’t back the emergency measure unless it reforms the MaineCare system, specifically by adding work requirements for childless, able-bodied adults.

Sen. Stacy Brenner (D-Cumberland) rose to object to the Legislature making major policy changes without input from the public, arguing lawmakers should instead honor the committee process and allow for a public hearing on these Medicaid reforms..

Many Republicans made clear their opposition remained unchanged. 

“People called me the last few days telling me we need these things paid, we need this money, and I agreed with them,” Sen. Scott Cryway (R-Kennebec) said. “But we’re not going to answer this problem because we were not included in trying to make a budget work,” referring to the past several sessions where the Democratic majority has passed budgets without Republican support.

Ahead of the upper chamber heading back into session, Daughtry, who assumed the role of Senate President this term, told Maine Morning Star she felt Senate Republicans were negotiating against the past. 

“I was a member of prior legislatures but we have a chance when every new one is sworn in to say, ‘Nope, we’re not going to do this the way it was done before. We’re going to start with a new tone, a new tenor,’” Daughtry said.

Daughtry described Senate Republican actions as “negotiating against ghosts from the past,” which she critiqued for not allowing space for the possibility of setting their own dynamic. Though she noted the support of House Republicans gives her hope for change. 

That hope was also for Maine lawmakers to rise above the partisan gridlock of Washington D.C., an ability to put ideology aside to get the work done that Daughtry said has been demonstrated in Maine history before.

At least one Republican senator is concerned about the growing demand for fidelity in politics entering Maine. 

“There’s an element in the Republican Party and the Republican caucuses that is sort of feeding off the chaos and disruptive energies of Donald Trump and it’s really not a good thing to see,” Rick Bennett of Oxford, one of two Senate Republicans who voted for the budget, told Maine Morning Star. 

He said the president “has given full license for everybody to treat each other rudely and disrespectfully and just to throw explosive devices in the midst of public deliberations with much more abandon than they used to.”