Mills Quietly Freezes MaineCare Provider Payments Until July 1

Gov. Janet Mills’ Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is once again withholding payments from MaineCare providers, delaying some claims by roughly two months until the next fiscal year begins on July 1.

The move — not announced by the Mills Administration but disclosed Friday by Medicaid analyst Kip Piper — is another quiet admission that Maine’s Medicaid accounts are running on fumes even as the administration insists, publicly and loudly, that there is no fraud problem in its $4-billion-and-growing welfare program.

The payment freeze was flagged Friday morning on X by veteran Medicaid analyst Kip Piper, who posted: “Maine Medicaid is delaying some provider claims payments ~two months until next fiscal year starts on July 1. Services will continue but provider cash flow will get hit.”

Piper, a former senior official at the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) who consults for state Medicaid programs across the country, tends to describe these situations in clinical terms. But translated out of Medicaid-analyst-speak, what Piper is describing is straightforward: Maine doesn’t have the cash to pay its bills, so it’s going to make the providers wait.

That description tracks with a terse DHHS provider bulletin dated April 22, 2026, which confirms that Maine will withhold certain pharmacy claims “through the end of the fiscal year, (which ends June 30, 2026).” The bulletin acknowledges that the Legislature did pass additional MaineCare funding in the recent supplemental budget (Public Law 2025 Ch. 650) — but notes that “this funding is not available until the next fiscal year, (which begins July 1, 2026).” Translation: the money is coming, but the cupboard is bare right now. Providers will have to float the state until summer.

The freeze targets multi-state and large health system chain pharmacies and out-of-state retail pharmacies for the payment cycles running from May 13 through June 30. That’s the same playbook DHHS rolled out in March 2025, when the department “capped weekly cycles” and began withholding payments from hospitals, pharmacies, and out-of-state providers while lawmakers fought over a $118 million bailout for MaineCare. Back then, DHHS eventually released the held claims in late June after the Legislature coughed up the supplemental funding. Now, barely ten months later, the department is doing it again.

The “Quiet Part” Keeps Getting Louder

A state freezing payments to its largest welfare program’s vendors in the final weeks of a fiscal year is the kind of thing that used to be a five-alarm fire in Augusta. Now it’s an every-spring tradition under the Mills Administration.

It’s also happening against a backdrop that gets harder to ignore by the week.

In January, a federal audit from the HHS Office of Inspector General found that Maine made at least $45.6 million in improper MaineCare payments for children’s autism services in a single year — 2023 alone. The OIG flagged another $22.4 million as “potentially improper,” and every single sample reviewed by auditors contained errors. Spending on those services surged from $52.2 million in 2019 to $80.6 million by 2023, and the OIG noted that Maine hadn’t performed a statewide postpayment review of these providers since the program began in 2010.

In February, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz rejected the Mills Administration’s request for a 30-day extension to respond to a federal demand for records on MaineCare billing.

On March 16, President Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, chaired by Vice President JD Vance. The executive order specifically names Maine as a state where vulnerabilities are believed to exist.

On March 26, the Maine state auditor reported that MaineCare’s Program Integrity Unit “may not provide adequate monitoring of all Medicaid services.”

Reporting from The Robinson Report and The Maine Wire was detailed multiple cases of autism care providers and home care agencies that have been cited for fraud, appear not to exist despite billing millions of dollars, or display the classic indicators of Medicaid fraud.

In March, Oz put out a statement in response to The Robinson Report’s reporting on Paradise Residential Services — which billed MaineCare more than $16 million before DHHS finally deauthorized it — calling the collapse of the autism care provider “deeply disturbing.” Paradise had charged more than twice the national rate for identical services. Former employees described neglect, billing manipulation, and insider self-dealing.

And on April 13 — just nine days before the latest payment-hold bulletin — DHHS “temporarily paused” new provider applications for four of MaineCare’s most-defrauded programs: Sections 18, 20, 21, and 29. Those are the Home and Community Based Services waivers. Section 21 alone funds autism group homes and has seen explosive growth in new provider entrants since 2018, almost all of them run by out-of-staters or “New Mainers.” The enrollment freeze was dressed up in bureaucratic language about “limited staff resources” and “timely and consistent review.”

But the implications of the drastic DHHS policy moves is clear: something is rotten in MaineCare.

All of which is to say: the Mills administration is, simultaneously, (a) freezing enrollment in the programs where fraud has been most widely documented, (b) freezing payments to vendors because the accounts can’t cover the bills, and (c) publicly insisting that there is no meaningful fraud problem in MaineCare.

Readers can decide whether to believe what Gov. Mills claims in public or to trust what’s actually happening behind the curtain of bureaucracy.

What Mills Is Saying vs. What Mills Is Doing

On March 6, Mills issued a statement ripping Dr. Oz as a “TV Doctor” and flatly rejecting claims of Medicaid fraud in Maine. She accused the Trump administration of weaponizing the federal probe for political purposes. Her soon-to-be U.S. Senate campaign (likely soon-to-be-suspended) has made the same claim repeatedly.

Meanwhile, here is what her own administration has actually done:

On January 10, 2025 — ten days before Republican President Trump was inaugurated — Attorney General Aaron Frey (D) issued a secret directive to DHHS employees telling them not to cooperate with Department of Justice attorneys and to refer any such inquiries up the chain to supervisors and state counsel. The Robinson Report was the first and only outlet to report that order.

In September 2025, DHHS Commissioner Sara Gagné-Holmes told top department officials — including Office of Family Independence Director Ian Yaffe — that DHHS needed to “check in” with the governor’s office “before we produce any data” in response to a House Oversight Committee request for records on MaineCare spending. In the same email chain, obtained by The Robinson Report under the Freedom of Access Act, Gagné-Holmes wrote that “the goal here is to avoid a congressional subpoena.”

Not “the goal here is transparency.” Not “the goal here is to cooperate.” The goal here is to avoid a congressional subpoena.

That is not the language of an administration that believes it has nothing to hide.

It is also not consistent with Mills’ own February 2026 line that “as District Attorney, Attorney General, and as Governor, I have always cracked down on criminals.”

In reality, DHHS staffers testifying to the legislature earlier this year admitted that the welfare agency has referred only one or two cases of Medicaid fraud for prosecution.

The Providers with No Discernible Business

While Mills attacks Oz and dismisses the federal probe, The Maine Wire has continued to document the pattern her administration has been slow to acknowledge: MaineCare providers pulling down millions in Medicaid reimbursements with little evidence of actual clients, employees, or operations.

At 75 Bishop St. in Portland, multiple home health agencies operate from the same address. A DHHS audit found that 5 Stars Home Health Care overbilled MaineCare by nearly $400,000 and failed to produce required documentation despite repeated extensions. By February 2025, DHHS had stopped payments to 25-year-old CEO Mostafa Alahmedi — but there’s no indication he was ever criminally investigated after walking away from the program with more than a million dollars.

At 203 Anderson St. in Portland, five home-care businesses — Holding Hands Home Health Care, Maine Connect Care, ACME Care, Engility Enterprises, and Morning Light Care — collectively received $13,774,554 in MaineCare payments from 2019 to 2024.

Earlier this month, Maine Wire reporters Jon Fetherston and Seamus Othot visited the listed addresses of home healthcare providers that had billed MaineCare tens of millions of dollars. They found little visible activity — empty offices, locked doors, no staff. Just names on door signs and tens of millions flowing out of Augusta.

Federal Medicaid data released earlier this year revealed that Maine spends far more via MaineCare than other states for the exact same services, including autism care, home care services, and even substance use disorder treatment. For example, Maine is spending 5.4 times as much per claim on substance abuse treatment drugs like methadone and Suboxone as the national average.

That isn’t a state with efficient, well-run Medicaid services. That’s a state where somebody is getting very rich very fast, and the people running the program aren’t asking a lot of questions.

This is the context in which Piper’s X post about the payment delay lands. Maine has expanded MaineCare twice under Mills — once in line with the Affordable Care Act, adding tens of thousands of childless, able-bodied adults to the program, and again in 2022 to add more non-citizens. MaineCare now consumes roughly 32 percent of Maine’s total state budget. Enrollment stands near 400,000, with the Mills Administration dragging its heels on the so-called “unwind” following the COVID-19 era elimination of eligibility requirements. And while DHHS has published a blog post insisting Maine’s cost growth is lower than that of other recent expansion states, the department cannot explain why specific line items — autism services, residential care, SUD treatment — are running multiples above the national average.

One explanation — systemic fraud, including fraud committed by organized criminal groups — has been repeatedly denied by the Mills Administration and cast as a political attack by her U.S. Senate campaign and Democratic lawmakers.

The Democratic majority’s $1.2 billion supplemental budget, which Mills signed, dumped another $33.8 million into Section 21 (the autism group home program) and $6.8 million into Section 29 — even as the administration was freezing new provider enrollment in those same programs. It also included a provision directing Maine to substitute state dollars for federal Medicaid matching funds any time the federal government restricts a specific provider. That provision, buried in the abortion section of the bill, is written broadly enough to force Maine taxpayers to cover 100 percent of payments to any MaineCare provider that CMS disqualifies for fraud.

In other words: the Legislature built in a state-funded backstop for federally-excluded providers, just in time for the VP Vance task force to start excluding them.

And yet, with all of that additional spending authorized, DHHS still can’t make its provider payroll through June.

The numbers don’t add up because the accounts are overdrawn. The enrollment freezes, the payment delays, the $45.6 million in improper autism payments, the $16 million to Paradise, the $13.7 million to five home-care shells at one Portland address — these are not separate stories. They are the same story. Maine’s largest welfare program has been bleeding money to dubious providers for years, federal investigators have finally noticed, and the bill is coming due.

For reasons that remain mysterious, the Mills Administration appears to have zero appetite for ensuring the MaineCare dollars are being spent wisely rather than getting pilfered by fraudsters.

Read more at The Robinson Report…