Brenda Harvey understands what may lie ahead for Mary Mayhew, Gov. Paul LePage’s nominee to be the next commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services.
For the past four years, Harvey oversaw the department, one of the state’s largest, most complex and most controversial. The DHHS oversees the state’s Medicaid program, mental health and substance abuse programs, the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, family and foster care programs, and social welfare programs such as food supplements and Temporary Aid for Needy Families.
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When Harvey took over, the department was trying to overhaul its Medicaid billing system and facing calls to reform the foster care and family services system. Now, with Harvey starting a job in the nonprofit sector and Mayhew hoping to take over, the DHHS faces pressure to restrict welfare programs and cut spending.
“This next biennium will be very, very difficult and require some difficult decisions,” Harvey said in an interview as she departed the job last month.
Harvey is now executive director of the New England States Consortium Systems Organization in Shrewsbury, Mass. The nonprofit works with state agencies on Medicaid issues and health care reform.
Reached at her office Wednesday, Harvey said she worked with Mayhew on legislative issues and state reimbursements to hospitals. “She was the lobbyist for the Maine Hospital Association during my tenure as commissioner,” Harvey said.
Harvey said her successor will have a big and important job. If confirmed, she said, Mayhew will have an opportunity to fill several top posts in the department, including two deputy positions.
Harvey said the department faced much change during the Baldacci administration, including the consolidation of the Department of Human Services and the Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services that created the DHHS.
“We reduced staff by 300 while serving well over 100,000 additional people,” Harvey said. “We have less general fund funding today than we did in 2002.”
The department’s $3.3 billion budget includes $680 million from the state’s general fund, compared with $970 million in 2006, according to the DHHS. Most of the department’s budget is paid for with federal funds.
Harvey said the department reformed its child and family services division, and staff members now work with parents as partners rather than adversaries.
“There has been some major cultural shifts,” she said. “The number of children in our care has significantly decreased.”
One of the last goals that Harvey accomplished, she said, was the creation of a Web page to share data on the department’s spending and services. The department had been criticized for not making statistics on welfare programs more accessible.
“People will still hold on to their myths and people will still repeat facts of 10 years ago, but there is now an opportunity to see real facts,” Harvey said.
The new web page, called the DHHS Dashboard, is at https://gateway.maine.gov/dhhs-apps/dashboard/.
Harvey said the LePage administration’s new commissioner will clearly focus on welfare programs and spending, something that emerged as hot political issues in the final year of her tenure. She said she saw her role as giving voice to people who are poor and disabled and making sure the state didn’t effectively blame the victims for needing help.
“It’s easy to fall into the latter when everybody’s struggling,” she said.
Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:
jrichardson@pressherald.com
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