Janet Mills $120M MaineCare Bailout Fails Senate After Democrats Reject Modest Welfare Reforms

The Maine Democrats’ failed to advance a $120 million MaineCare bailout plan after Democratic lawmakers rejected modest welfare reforms proposed by Republicans leaders and even Democratic Gov. Janet Mills.

Following a lengthy procedural fight, complicated by the absence of some GOP lawmakers, the Democrat-controlled Senate could not get two-thirds support for LD 209, an emergency spending bill sponsored by Rep. Drew Gattine (D-Westbrook) on behalf of the governor.

Thursday afternoon, a rushed session of the Senate ended with the measure dying.

At the same time, debate over the controversial spending package revealed that Democratic lawmakers have already resolved to pursue a majority-only partisan budget using the same extraordinary parliamentary gimmick invoked in 2024 to secure a record-breaking $10.3 billion biennial budget.

According to the Department of Administrative and Financial Services (DAFS), a MaineCare bailout package is urgently needed because the welfare program’s FY 2024-2025 funding levels underestimated the total cost of the program by more than $118 million.

[RELATED: Supplemental Budget Stripped of Emergency Designation as Maine Lawmakers Remain Gridlocked Along Partisan Lines…]

Earlier this year, DAFS Commissioner Kirsten Figueroa threatened to halt payments to Maine’s medical providers, including some of Maine’s largest employers, i.e., the hospitals, unless lawmakers agreed on a MaineCare bailout package.

Due to the alleged urgency of the welfare funding shortfall, Democrats are attempting to pass the bill on an emergency basis. This would allow the spending provisions of the bill to take effect immediately. However, emergency bills also require a higher two-thirds supermajority in each house of the legislature in order to pass.

In repeated 20-12 votes Thursday, Senate Democrats fell short.

As the parliamentary theater played out, Democrats revealed on several occasions that they’re already planning to cut GOP lawmakers out of the upcoming FY 26-27 biennial budget—expected to reach nearly $12 billion.

Prior to the tenure of Gov. Mills, so-called “majority budgets” or “partisan budgets” were rare and taboo.

Previous legislatures, even during the acrimonious years of Republican Gov. Paul LePage, opted for two-year spending deals that received support from two-thirds of the House and Senate.

Those days are long gone, giving rise to extreme partisanship that wound up costing Senate President Mattie Daughtry (D-Cumberland) the Republican vote that could have helped her pass the MaineCare bailout.

Sen. Bruce Bickford (R-Androscoggin) asked several times on the Senate floor whether any of his colleagues would publicly agree to pursue a bipartisan budget, but Democratic leaders refused to make any promises.

Bickford went into the State House today intending to vote in favor of the spending bill, but the Democrats’ refusal to agree on a future bipartisan budget bill convinced him to vote otherwise.

“I asked the senate president three times if someone from the senate majority leadership could say on mic that they would commit to a two-thirds majority for the biennial budget,” Bickford said.

“Not a peep from anyone in their leadership. I even declared that if I didn’t get a response I would vote no,” he said. “I had to hold to my word”

The fate of the MaineCare bailout remains up in the air, but the clock is still running. If the analysis the Mills Administration has provided about the MaineCare funding situation can be trusted, health care providers in Maine who offer services to Medicaid patients could continue to stall.

Democratic lawmakers have limited options to come up with a solution.

They could potentially sway Republican votes by agreeing to Republican amendments, like those offered by Republican Senate Leader Trey Stewart (R-Aroostook). Those amendments would strengthen work requirements for welfare benefits and impose other limits on the availability of various welfare programs.

Stewart’s amendments would have required DHHS to freeze and gradually reduce the number of able-bodied childless adults on MaineCare, required individuals aged 19 to 65 to perform 20 hours of community service or work in order to receive any form of welfare, and capped housing assistance under municipal welfare programs at a maximum of three months within any 12-month period.

Legislative Democrats rejected those modest attempts to rein in Maine’s growing and increasingly expensive welfare programs. But that didn’t come as a surprise considering they’d already rejected the far more meager limits on welfare benefits originally proposed by Gov. Mills.

Mills’ original two-year proposal for 2026 and 2027 suggested limits on welfare benefits for non-citizens present in Maine who are allowed to work but are not working, indicating some openness on the part of Democrats to compromise on welfare reform.

Assistant Republican Senate Leader Matt Harrington (R-York) said multiple times during the legislative debate that the GOP members were willing to remain in the chamber and hammer out a compromise deal that could reach the two-thirds threshold.

After the measure officially died, he told the Maine Wire that at least some Senate Republicans would likely have been swayed to vote “Yes” had Democrats compromised even slightly by backing Mills’s original welfare reforms.

If Democratic lawmakers refuse to compromise with the GOP and adopt welfare reforms like those offered by Stewart or their own governor, they could also pursue the “extraordinary occasion” gimmick to get a majority-only spending bill to take effect immediately.

[RELATED: Mills Told GOP She’ll Sign Any Tax Hike Democrats Send Her in Majority Budget…]

Although that trick has never been used with simple spending bills, as opposed to two-year biennial budget bills, Mills’ Chief of Staff Jeremy Kennedy has previously told House Republican leaders that Mills would likely sign whatever MaineCare bailout package the legislature could put on her desk.

The bill is technically dead under legislative rules. But Gattine, whose spouse works as a Senior Policy Analyst in the governor’s office, has multiple other concept draft bills that could be used as vehicles to essentially copy-and-paste the same general language into another attempt at a Mainecare bailout.