Latest news with #Mainers
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Bridgton medical center closing, citing financial pressures on health care system
May 29—A community clinic in Bridgton announced on Thursday that it will be closing in August, the latest shuttering of medical services in Maine. The announcement comes after Northern Light Inland Hospital in Waterville closed for patients this week, and after several birthing centers around Maine have closed in recent years. The reasons cited by DFD Russell Medical Center in Bridgton are familiar: low reimbursement rates from both government and private insurance, workforce shortages and an inability to rely on federal funding through Medicare and Medicaid. "This decision follows a comprehensive review of persistent financial and workforce challenges," the written announcement said. "In addition to financial pressures, DFD has experienced significant difficulty recruiting and retaining highly skilled health care providers in rural Maine — a challenge shared by many rural health organizations." Despite efforts to find alternatives, "continuing operations at this location is not sustainable," DFD said. The final day the medical center will see patients is Aug. 28. The Bridgton location has been open for four years, and DFD also operates clinics in Turner, Monmouth and Leeds that will remain open. "This is not a decision we made lightly, and it is not a reflection of our commitment to the Bridgton community," according to a written statement attributed to DFD's leadership team. "Rather, it is a decision rooted in responsibility — responsibility to quality care, our patients, our staff and the long-term sustainability of rural health care." DFD will help patients transition to Central Maine Healthcare and other primary care providers. DFD officials declined an interview with the Press Herald on Wednesday. The latest closure comes as Maine is experiencing a crisis in access to health care services, especially in rural parts of the state. While a record number of Mainers now have health insurance, many are finding it difficult or impossible to get help from a broad range of providers — primary care doctors, medical specialists, mental health counselors, dentists. It can take months — even more than a year — to get an appointment with a health professional, frustrated patients told the Portland Press Herald. Health care providers in Maine have also warned that the proposed cuts to Medicaid that were approved in the U.S. House of Representatives could eliminate health insurance coverage for an estimated 34,000 Maine residents and put more pressure on the already financially strained health care system, especially in rural communities. Copy the Story Link
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
With passage of two bills, Maine poised to expand testing of private wells for PFAS
Per and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS, are chemicals that linger in the body and are linked to health issues like cancer, obesity, liver damage, decreased fertility, thyroid disease, high cholesterol and hormone suppression. (Photo Illustration by) Lawmakers passed two bills to expand testing for contaminants in private wells in the state. On Thursday, the Maine Senate passed LD 493, which will require landlords of residential buildings who have private wells to test the water for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called PFAS, every five years and share those results with the tenants. The bill does not require them to treat the water if contaminants are found. Support from the upper chamber came after the House of Representatives voted 78-69 on Wednesday to pass it. Beyond more robust testing for renters' wells, the Legislature also passed LD 500 this week to add PFAS to the list of contaminants the Department of Health and Human Services recommends testing for in private wells. The proposal would also provide free well water testing for low-income residents. The House of Representatives passed the bill with a 79-66 vote. Both bills still need enactment votes from each chamber. But before heading to Gov. Janet Mills for final approval, they will likely end up on the special appropriations table. LD 500 has a fiscal note of about $150,000 a year, while LD 493 is projected to cost between $110,000 and $125,000 annually. More than half of Mainers get their drinking water from private drinking wells, which aren't regulated under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. Landlords are already required to test for arsenic in wells that provide drinking water and share the test results with tenants within 10 days of being notified of the results. The new legislation builds upon that by requiring landlords to also test the water for PFAS, and other potentially harmful contaminants including lead and uranium. PFAS have been linked to health concerns including cancer, liver damage, pregnancy complications, increased cholesterol levels and more. PFAS contamination in water is a concern in Maine not only from the historic practice of spreading chemical-laden sludge on farmland, but also from spills of toxic firefighting foam like the one in Brunswick last summer as well as landfill leachate. 'There is enormous mental stress associated in wondering whether your drinking water is making you sick,' said Rep. Laurie Osher (D-Orono), who sponsored LD 493, during discussion on the House floor. Some House Republicans opposed LD 493, arguing that landlords may have to raise rents to cover the cost of testing, which goes against affordable housing priorities. When discussing LD 500, Rep. Michele Meyer (D-Eliot), who co-chairs the Legislature's Health and Human Services Committee, argued that 'paying for these tests is much more affordable than the health care costs associated with PFAS.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
A filmmaker asked, 'What does being American mean to you?' These Mainers answered.
May 27—"What does being American mean to you? What does democracy mean to you? What does freedom mean to you?" Filmmaker Daniella Vale traveled across the United States to ask those questions, visiting 26 states and interviewing 52 people. Five of them were Mainers, and their answers and faces are now part of an immersive installation in Manhattan. "Path of Liberty: That Which Unites Us" is a free exhibit at Freedom Plaza near the United Nations in New York City. The artists took over 6 acres on a site that could someday be a casino but is currently undeveloped. A self-guided walking tour winds through a field of 41 huge screens. Some play video clips of interviews with people in Maine and across the country. More than half are massive photographs of Americans in their home states, so visitors can see Flora Magaya on a pier in Portland in her lobstering gear and Alessia McCobb in her field at Sound Pine Farm in Brunswick. Magaya, 19, traveled to New York City to find her portrait standing 15 feet tall and 20 feet wide. "I was able to learn so much about what other people are doing across the country and what it means for them to be American," Magaya said of the exhibit. "My experience is very individualized, and for them, it's the same. But we're all hardworking Americans. It just broadened my perspective." This project began out of a desire to recognize the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is next year. The Soloviev Group, the real estate firm that wants to develop a casino on that site, decided to use the space in the meantime for an early birthday celebration for America. Vale, who is based in New York, said her idea for the project came from her own experiences traveling the world for her work. "New Yorkers can very much be in their bubble," she said. "It's so important that we really try to grasp just how vast and diverse of a country we have." So Vale and her team loaded up their van and started driving. They were on the road last year during election season — a particularly divisive time. But they found common ground everywhere they went. "It was really interesting to get those answers from all these different people, because what we started to see were themes," Vale said. "When I said, 'What does it mean to be American?' It was this idea that it means justice, it means equality, it means freedom, it means being able to do what I want to do." View this post on Instagram A post shared by Path of Liberty at Freedom Plaza (@pathoflibertynyc) Vale had never been to Maine before she visited for this project. The crew spent a day with Lift All Boats at Luke's Lobster in Portland, an apprenticeship program meant to give young people of color the opportunity to learn about a heritage industry that can be hard to enter. Magaya has worked in the program for a couple of summers because she likes being outside and wanted to learn something new. Now, she is studying architecture and engineering at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland. "At the time when filming was happening, I didn't really think much of it," Magaya said. "To fast forward and to see my big picture somewhere in Manhattan, that's really awesome." Her portrait is paired with an audio clip from her interview: "When you live in Maine, you hear about lobstering a lot. They talk about it with such reverence, like, 'My father passed this down to me.' Which is great and you know, I love that for them. But since you're not a part of it, you never really think, 'Oh, this is like a job I can do.' But I know that we're in a certain moment in time. They want to open doors in these types of industries. I started actually being interested in boating and just having a whole new world open to me. I love the atmosphere, I love working hard, just being outdoors, being in nature. I'm appreciative of the lobstermen who have come before me. It's their work that I will be continuing." View this post on Instagram A post shared by Path of Liberty at Freedom Plaza (@pathoflibertynyc) The crew also visited Sound Pine Farm in Brunswick. McCobb, 32, recalled talking to Vale about her farm and the community that supported her CSA program. A month later, she also attended the opening. The pictures of different landscapes, including Sound Pine Farm, stood striking against the skyscrapers of New York City. "It's hard for me to understand how people could vote a particular way or make the choices they do, but I think it's always good to be put into this situation where you're staring at a huge example of someone else's different experience and be reminded that there are so many forces at work that contribute to our understanding of this country and why we make the choices we do," McCobb said. The installation created an image of America that is full of both optimism and obstacles. "The message that was conveyed to me was, America is so vast and holds so much promise," McCobb said. "But are we able to attain that? Are we all able to attain that equally?" The five Mainers in the exhibit are: — Earl Bigelow, of Watersongmusic in Bowdoinham — Ben Coniff, CIO of Luke's Lobster — Esperanza Kunieki, apprentice with Lift All Boats — Flora Magaya, apprentice with Lift All Boats — Alessia McCobb, co-owner of Soundpine Farm ------ IF YOU GO "Path of Liberty" will be open through the summer. The installation is free to visit, but requires reservations. For more information, visit Get a glimpse of the exhibit and watch video clips of interviews on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok @pathoflibertynyc. Copy the Story Link
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Reporting work requirements are bad at encouraging work, good at making people sick and hungry
A 'SNAP welcomed here' sign is seen at the entrance to a Big Lots store in Portland, Oregon. (Getty Images) Congress wants to make work reporting requirements in safety net programs harsher and more pervasive to remove supports from tens of thousands of Mainers and use that money to pay for tax cuts that overwhelmingly go to the wealthy. Maine has been down this road before and saw that work requirements take away help from people who need it and don't support work. The congressional bill currently under consideration would make work requirements harsher in three ways. It would: Expand the existing requirement in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for adults without dependents or a documented disability by increasing the age limit from 55 to 64, which will put 4,000 older adult Mainers newly at risk of losing food assistance. Change the definition of 'dependent' to only apply to children under the age of 7, which will put another 27,000 parents and caregivers of school-age kids at risk of losing food assistance. In total, 31,000 Mainers are likely to lose food assistance under these two changes. Impose a similar work reporting requirement on the Medicaid (MaineCare) program for the first time in the program's history. 34,000 Mainers are likely to lose health care under this change. While some Republicans have sought to portray work requirements as distinct from benefit cuts, the proven reality is these changes will remove millions of Americans from the affected programs, the majority of whom are working, caregiving, or suffering from a serious health condition that prevents them from working. Work requirements create a lot of new paperwork and administrative barriers. According to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, these would cost $6 million a year in additional administrative costs alone. The extra bureaucratic hoops also lead to the disenrollment of many people who are meeting the requirements but just get caught up in red tape. By one estimate, 13% of people impacted by the congressional proposal would not currently meet the work requirements for Medicaid and don't qualify for an exemption, but the actual number who would lose care is three times higher (39%), meaning that the majority of people losing coverage already participate in the workforce or qualify for an exemption. Approximately one third of Maine workers below traditional retirement age work less than full-time, year-round. In a seasonal economy like Maine's, it can be particularly hard for people to meet a work reporting requirement on a consistent basis every month because the jobs simply aren't available or the hours vary. Many Mainers have health conditions that make it hard for them to work but are not always easy to prove to gain an exemption from a work requirement. As many as 110,000 Mainers aged 18 to 64 report having some kind of disability, but only 30,000 of them actually receive Social Security Disability benefits, leaving tens of thousands of Mainers with a harder time proving their disability to gain an exemption. There are plenty of other obstacles to work that the bill doesn't recognize. A 2021 survey of unemployed Mainers found that one in eight couldn't work due to childcare problems, and 6% didn't have reliable transportation. Finally, it's worth remembering that food and medical assistance are key to health and stability people need to engage in the labor force. Medicaid expansion has increased employment among adults with disabilities and SNAP has also been shown to help people find and keep employment by freeing up money for expenses like childcare. Taking both away from folks who can't find consistent work will only make their barriers to employment worse as well as make it harder for them to get by in general. Maine has prior experience with expanding work requirements that proved unsuccessful. In late 2014, then-Governor Paul LePage expanded work requirements in the SNAP program for adults without a documented disability who did not have children at home. Nearly three quarters of the SNAP recipients who were subject to the new requirements lost their benefits, with tens of thousands losing assistance over the next few years. Many of those who lost benefits were still unable to find work in the year afterwards, and those who did had incomes well below the poverty line. A 2017 survey of Mainers who lost SNAP benefits due to the LePage policy changes found that almost 80% of them had to use food pantries more often after the change, and 86% said it led to them making difficult choices between paying for food and other necessities like rent or health care. National research shows similar patterns in the SNAP program — the federal work reporting requirement makes it much more likely that people will lose food assistance but does nothing meaningful to help those folks find work. Recently several states have experimented with work requirements in Medicaid, with similarly poor results: Under Arkansas' temporary Medicaid work requirement, one in four people subject to the new test lost their health care coverage, most of whom could not get alternative health insurance, and there was no evidence of increased employment as a result. Georgia imposed the work requirement when they expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act. One year into the program, just 2% of people thought to be eligible for the program have enrolled, leaving hundreds of thousands of people unable to get health care. This is despite the state spending millions of dollars on consultants to conduct an outreach campaign. New Hampshire suspended its Medicaid work requirement after it had trouble even notifying impacted enrollees about the change. Despite multiple outreach efforts, nearly half of the people potentially subject to the work requirement didn't even receive notices from the state. Of those assessed for the work requirement, only one third were judged to be meeting it when the policy was suspended. Congress is at risk of repeating the mistakes made in Maine and other states and expanding them to the whole country in its reconciliation bill. Work requirements are efficient at taking food and health care away and creating more costly rules for states, but they don't lead to more people working. Tens of thousands of Mainers will lose access to health care and food assistance and will suffer real hardships as a result. This commentary was originally published by the Maine Center for Economic Policy blog. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
American Military News
7 days ago
- General
- American Military News
Memorial Day was created because Civil War veterans fought for it
May 26—This story was originally published in May 2021. There are nearly 150 Civil War memorials in more than 130 cities and towns across Maine, honoring the approximately 9,400 Mainers who died in the war and the veterans who survived, as well as the more than 360,000 other Union soldiers who died nationwide. These memorials can fade into the background as people go about their lives. Even fewer people may notice the five-pointed star that adorns the majority of Maine's Civil War memorials. The star isn't a simple decoration — it's the emblem of the Grand Army of the Republic, the fraternal and advocacy organization composed of Civil War veterans, founded just a few years after the war ended. In many ways, it was the precursor to organizations like the American Legion and the VFW. And as a national organization with considerable political clout, it was largely responsible for making Memorial Day a federal holiday and for the creation of the vast majority of Maine's Civil War memorials. 'You can honestly say that if there was not a Grand Army of the Republic, we would not have had Memorial Day as a federal holiday as early as it happened,' said Brian Swartz, a Bangor author and Civil War historian. 'There might have been some local efforts, but [it was] really the first veterans organization to really flex its political muscle.' The Grand Army of the Republic was founded in 1866, largely in response to the poor treatment by the government of Civil War veterans, most of whom did not receive a pension nor medical care once the Department of War demobilized the military in 1865. 'These were like veterans coming back from Vietnam. Their families didn't understand the experiences they'd been through and endured,' Swartz said. 'These men were brothers to each other. They'd watched people they had very close friendships with die in battle. And they were receiving no help at all.' Aside from their work to ensure proper care and compensation for war veterans, among the first efforts the organization put its muscle behind was the creation of Memorial Day. In 1868, the organization's commander-in-chief John Logan proclaimed May 30 as the day Americans would pay tribute to war casualties, missing-in-action and deceased veterans. Though there was a long tradition of decorating the graves of war dead, the 1868 proclamation was the first national recognition of a specific day as a day to remember the dead. From 1868 until 1970, it was celebrated on May 30. That year, the date was changed to the last Monday in May to allow for a three-day weekend, a move that some veterans thought cheapened the solemnity of the occasion. In Maine, one of the major projects of the state and local Grand Army of the Republic posts and their associated women's auxiliaries was to raise money for and build Civil War memorials. The majority of these monuments were erected between 1870 and 1920, and vary widely in size and style. Some are simple granite obelisks, like the town of Hermon's memorial now located near Hermon Elementary School, or the Hallowell monument. Some show a soldier standing proudly, as in the towns of Bath, Blue Hill, Caribou and Corinna. And some are unlike any others, like the memorial at the Grand Army of the Republic lot at Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, which features a reconstruction of a Civil War-era fort and several cannons. 'These memorials also served as a way for Civil War veterans to remember the friends they lost that are still down there,' Swartz said. 'There are many, many Mainers who went into unmarked graves down south. We'll never find them.' Among the organization's other major projects was advocacy for the creation of a medical facility for veterans in Maine. In part through their work, the country's first veterans facility, Togus, was developed in the town of Chelsea. By the 1940s, membership had dwindled. Maine's last surviving Civil War veterans were Melvin Jellison of Clifton and Zachary McLaughlin of Phillips, both of whom were Grand Army of the Republic members and who died within a few months of each other in 1947. With the death of the country's last surviving Civil War veteran in 1956, the Grand Army of the Republic was dissolved. The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War was its heir, and that organization still has around 6,400 members in 2021. Though it's been 65 years since the last Civil War veteran was alive, the work of the Grand Army of the Republic is still visible in every corner of the nation — from the countless organizations that seek to serve veterans that it inspired, to the war monuments that dot the landscape, to the fact that we observe Memorial Day in the first place. 'Someone might see that five-pointed star, and they won't know what that means,' Swartz said. 'But it symbolizes the brotherhood the boys felt, and the work they did to ensure their legacy was never forgotten.' © 2025 the Bangor Daily News (Bangor, Maine). Visit Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
