AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Maine's incoming Democratic governor nominated a former senior White House health policy expert Friday to head the state's embattled health agency and its $3.4 billion budget.
Gov.-elect Janet Mills said she will nominate former President Barack Obama administration staffer Jeanne Lambrew as the next commissioner of Maine's Department of Health and Human Services. Mills said Lambreau's policy experience, which includes rolling out Obama's signature health care law, will help her reinvigorate morale and rebuild the health and human services department.
The state Senate, which returns in January, considers such gubernatorial nominations.
Lambrew will head a department that has received scrutiny for years over its mounting child welfare caseload , its plans for a privately run psychiatric residence and its response to the state's opioid crisis .
It's a laundry list of issues that Mills said her administration will be investigating in coming weeks. "We've got to do a deep dive into these bureaus," she said, but such work will take "time and effort."
Mills has promised to make health care her top priority as governor. She's vowed to immediately expand Medicaid as voters demanded under Obama's health care law, and a state judge recently pushed back the deadline for Medicaid expansion to February.
The state has yet to fund roughly 100 staffers needed to be hired and train to help roll-out Medicaid expansion. But Mills said Friday that other states have expanded Medicaid "fairly expeditiously," and Maine will too.
If confirmed, Lambrew would inherit an agency shaped over the last eight years by outgoing fiscally conservative Gov. Paul LePage and former commissioner Mary Mayhew, who together pushed for Maine to devote its resources to the "truly needy."
LePage's administration hired welfare fraud investigators, pushed for drug testing of welfare recipients , cut the state's Medicaid rolls and blocked Medicaid expansion.
