As covered in our previous post, “Partnership UrgesMaine’s Legislature to Act on Behalf of Workers,” the end of 2024, the Mills administration announced that the Department of Health and Human Services will not implement cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for the MaineCare program required by 22 M.R.S.A §3173-J and §7402.
We garnered the support of over 60 organizations in a letter to legislators just before the holidays, and then on January 23rd, 38 advocates testified in front of the Joint Standing Committee on Health and Human Services (HHS) asking for additional funding to reinstate these COLAs in LD 209, the Supplemental Budget, retroactively to January 1, 2025.
On January 28th, HHS held a work session on the Supplemental Budget, where after over an hour of thoughtful questioning of members of the Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS) staff and caucusing among themselves, members of HHS unanimously recommended restoring a 1.95% COLA in the Supplemental Budget. While this is well below the amount needed to comply with the requirement that the minimum reimbursement rate for the labor portion of services be 125% of minimum wage, we are grateful to the members of the committee who worked hard to get answers from DHHS staff and to understand the cost of reinstating the COLAs.
During their line of questioning, we also learned that because DHHS failed to notify Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) of the COLA increase, it is unclear how retroactively, the COLAs can be reinstated.
The matter is now in the hands of the Joint Standing Committee on Appropriations and Financial Affairs (AFA). We have been in touch with members of the AFA and it is our hope that they will accept the recommendation of the HHS committee and that the Supplemental Budget, with the addition of the COLAs, will pass unanimously out of AFA and to the full Legislature, where it will need to pass with a 2/3rds majority in order to become effective immediately.
You can watch the HHS work session online here. The parts pertinent to the COLAs start just before 1:50:00 in the recording.