Guest Column: Mayhew is a solid choice to lead state health care agency

May 16--Mary Mayhew will do an excellent job leading Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration.

During my time in the Maine Legislature, I served on the Health and Human Services Committee and witnessed abject waste and fraud in that state.

The budget of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services was consistently in the red -- and welfare enrollment was on the rise.

But that changed when Mayhew took over the department in 2011.

Mayhew led the turnaround through responsible fiscal management and by prioritizing the most vulnerable. Under her leadership the agency produced regular surpluses -- but Mayhew's most meaningful accomplishment was moving thousands of Maine families from welfare to work.

When Maine reinstated work requirements and time limits for able-bodied adults on welfare, tens of thousands of those adults moved off welfare; studies showed those individuals went on to earn more than double their previous incomes within one year of leaving welfare.

Mayhew's commitment to the truly needy didn't end there.

In order to preserve funds for the elderly and disabled in Maine, 80,000 able-bodied adults were transitioned off the Medicaid program. With the tax dollars saved, the department was able to increase support for nursing homes by 40 percent and provide $100 million in new funds to help those with intellectual and physical disabilities who had been languishing for years on waiting lists for Medicaid services.

Child poverty also dropped under Mayhew's watch: in 2017, only 14 percent of Maine children were in poverty (down from 20 percent in 2012).

As the commissioner of Maine's Department of Health and Human Services for seven years -- and then briefly as the director of Medicaid for President Donald Trump -- Mayhew was relentless in her mission to preserve resources for the truly needy.

Tarren Bragdon is the president of the Foundation for Government Accountability, a policy organization based in Naples. He is a former member of the Maine House of Representatives.

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