Did Mary Mayhew Leave CMS To Cover Up Medicaid Fraud In Florida For The Right Price?

Now, why would Mary want to leave Maine and go to Florida to run their child welfare programs under Medicaid?

I know!

Money, money, money.

She is a corporate lobbyist, with a hospital background, deep down in her soul.

Perhaps DeSantis knows there is going to be a dark period which shall linger over Florida for what they have done to the children.

Perhaps Mary knows there is going to be a dark period dark period which shall linger over the U.S. for what they have done to the children.

Perhaps Mary was recruited to cover up Medicaid Fraud In Child Welfare.

Mayhew leaves Trump administration after less than 3 months for Florida post

Mary Mayhew

AUGUSTA, Maine — The former Maine health and human services commissioner who led a conservative transformation of the state’s welfare system under former Gov. Paul LePage has left her job overseeing the federal Medicaid program after less than three months.

Mary Mayhew was hired by the administration of President Donald Trump to run Medicaid in mid-October, but she resigned by Friday for a new post under Florida Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis, a Republican, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Mayhew, a former hospital lobbyist who ran the Maine Department of Health and Human Services under LePage from 2011 until 2017, became a Republican policy star and Democratic bogeyman during a tenure in which she oversaw steep reductions in the state’s welfare rolls and ran point on the former governor’s crusade against Medicaid expansion.

In a statement first reported on by The Washington Times, Mayhew said she was “grateful” for the federal job and the Trump administration’s “vision for state flexibility” in the Medicaid program made her want to return to administer programs at the state level.

Mayhew has Florida connections. She has traveled the country pushing conservative welfare policy for the Foundation for Government Accountability, an advocacy group based there and run by Maine native Tarren Bragdon, whose brother runs another firm that worked for the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary campaign in which Mayhew finished third of four candidates.

In Maine, much of Mayhew’s work looks slated to be reversed by Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat who took over for the term-limited LePage on Wednesday after a Democratic wave election flipped the Blaine House, Maine’s 2nd Congressional District and the state Senate.

On the first full day of her tenure on Thursday, Mills fulfilled a campaign promise by directing the department Mayhew once ran to begin implementing Medicaid expansion to an estimated 70,000 Mainers under the Affordable Care Act, which was approved by voters in 2017.

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Maine Celebrates Its Anniversary Of Child Welfare Fraud With Legally Kidnapped

Almost one year ago to the day, Mary Mayhew, the DHHS Commissioner of Maine's child welfare system stepped down.

Mary Mayhew steps down as DHHS commissioner

Updated: 10:35 AM EDT May 24, 2017

AUGUSTA, Maine — Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew is stepping down, according to the LePage administration. Gov. Paul LePage announced on Wednesday that Mayhew was leaving DHHS effective Friday.

Former DHHS commissioner Mary Mayhew announces run for governor Before being appointed commissioner, Mayhew served as the senior health policy advisor for the LePage Administration. Prior to that, Mayhew served for more than a decade as vice president of the Maine Hospital Association. LePage said an acting DHHS commissioner will be named later this week.

But wait, it seems Governor LePage has appointed an interim Director.

Updated: May 26, 2017 5:41 pm

Rick Hamilton

LePage appoints longtime DHHS manager as interim replacement for Mayhew

The following is taken from Maine DHHS:

Commissioner Ricker Hamilton oversees the largest agency in state government, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which has an annual budget of over $3.4 billion and more than 3,400 employees. He was appointed as acting Commissioner in May of 2017 and nominated for Commissioner in October. 

Prior to this role, Commissioner Hamilton served as Deputy Commissioner of Programs for Maine DHHS for nearly four years. He has more than 40 years of experience in management, program development, strategic planning, and social work in programs that provide services for children and families, substance use disorder, mental health, sexual assault and domestic violence, aging and disability and acute psychiatric care. 

He is an instructor at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, serves on the American Bar Association's Commission on Law and Aging, acts as an advisor and trainer for the FBI; Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women; National Clearinghouse on Abuse in Later Life; National Institute on the Prosecution of Elder Abuse; and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. He received the 2016 Children's Advocate Award from the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault. 

Commissioner Hamilton holds a B.A. degree from St. Anselm College, an M.S.W. degree from Boston College Graduate School of Social Work, and received certification by the Maine Criminal Justice Academy as a Reserve Law Enforcement Officer.

Considering the fact that Rick Hamilton is a licensed attorney, it seems he is not very good when it comes to administering DHHS.

I should file on his license for incompetence.

In honor of her resignation, Maine DHHS administration celebrates its time honored tradition of child welfare fraud by generating a fraudulent letter to Legally Kidnapped by identifying Mayhew as the principal agent, even though she is no longer there.

I believe there are some serious legal issues here which need to be immediately addressed by the DHHS administration of Maine.

Congratulations, Maine on another year of child welfare fraud.

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DHHS commissioner needs time to figure out why department is over budget

Ok, times up.

By Eric Russell, BDN Staff

Posted Oct. 24, 2011, at 4:57 p.m.

             

Pat Wellenbach | AP

Mary Mayhew, Commissioner of Health and Human Services, outlines further tax cuts as she updates lawmakers on state revenues in advance of a report on progress finding $25 million in budget cuts to balance the state budget at a hearing in Augusta on Monday, Oct. 24, 2011.

AUGUSTA, Maine — Changes likely are coming to Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services to address an expected budget shortfall, but the scope of those changes has lawmakers guessing.

DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew briefed members of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee on Monday about her department’s expenses and revenues for the first quarter of fiscal year 2012.

From July 1 to Sept. 30, DHHS expenses were supposed to equal about a quarter of the budget. Instead, expenses were closer to 30 percent, a trend that would be unsustainable over the entire fiscal year.

Mayhew was not prepared Monday to offer lawmakers an analysis of why expenses were higher than anticipated or what changes would be needed. When asked she did confirm that her department would present a supplemental budget to the Legislature in January.

“My commitment is to provide [lawmakers] a more comprehensive analysis that gives them a better sense of the potential shortfall and also bring forward any potential changes that we’ll have,” she said in an interview later Monday.

Members of the Appropriations Committee await more information from the commissioner, some with more trepidation than others.

“What I heard [Monday] is: There is going to be a supplemental budget. That tells me there is an issue,” said Rep. Kenneth Fredette, R-Newport. “We don’t know the size of the problem, but I’m guessing it’s going to be somewhere between $50 million and $100 million.”

Rep. John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, however, said Mayhew did not convince him on Monday that the DHHS budget problem necessitates drastic changes.

“They didn’t have to move any money in order to make payroll and meet expenses,” he said. “To me it looks like we may well be within budget at this point going forward.”

Rep. Peggy Rotundo, D-Lewiston, said although DHHS’ expenses and revenues are not equal at the moment, she was cautious about blowing the numbers out of proportion.

“What I heard is: They aren’t clear in terms of what’s happening,” she said. “Months ago, they were saying that an increased number of those receiving services was driving up costs. We looked at figures and realized that wasn’t the case.”

Gov. Paul LePage has said that he believes Maine’s DHHS costs are too high and wants to make sure high administrative costs aren’t getting in the way of delivering services.

The governor pointed to a 2009 study done by the Legislature’s Office of Program Evaluation and Governmental Accountability that showed one narrow area of contracted services — children’s outpatient mental health services — spent 27 cents of every dollar on administrative costs.

“Only 73 cents of every dollar gets to provide a service,” the governor said in August. “I believe it should be 88 or 89 cents.”

The governor even has threatened to eliminate programs altogether.

“We need to look at DHHS more as a safety net and less as a way of life,” he said this summer. “Some programs may just have to go away.”

Rotundo said she’s not opposed to a supplemental DHHS budget, something she called fairly routine, but she worried about cuts to programs that people need.

Fredette countered that economic realities are forcing lawmakers to “right-size” government.

“We need to look at revenues and build government around the concept of matching that,” he said. “Tax increases are not on the table, so we need to look at where we can make adjustments.”

If changes are proposed, the DHHS budget almost certainly will address MaineCare, which has seen a steep increase in the number of claims filed as the economy continues to languish.

But MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, is funded largely with federal dollars. The state pays about a third of the cost. That means Maine is limited in its ability to change the program dramatically.

The deadline for DHHS to submit a supplemental budget proposal is the end of the month, but Mayhew said her department would need more time. Any substantial changes in her department would require legislative approval.

Martin said if the governor wants to proceed with some of his proposals, including an estimated$93 million plan to eliminate income taxes on retiree pensions, he doesn’t see how DHHS would be spared.

Rotundo added that she hopes the recent budget concerns at DHHS don’t turn into an excuse for the department to make cuts, particularly if the LePage administration wants in turn to pay for other things.

For this budget, DHHS has been working off baseline budget projections that were inherited from the Baldacci administration and Mayhew said were too low.

“Year after year we keep adding things on without really understanding the impact,” she said. “We need to be asking whether our budget reflects true experiences.”

Maine Launches Medicaid Fraud in Child Welfare Awareness Campaign

Maine did not accept the Medicaid Expansion of the Affordable Care Act.

In order to qualify for the Medicaid Expansion, which would have provided funding for services to families with children who need assistance, Maine would have been mandated to come into compliance in dealing with Medicaid fraud.

Instead of complying to stop Medicaid fraud in child welfare, it becomes fiscally beneficial to allow fraud to flourish through billing of reactionary programs.

This has nothing to do with child abuse prevention.  It is a marketing campaign about profiting from poverty at the expense of the most vulnerable of society.

Poverty is the crime of child abuse.

It goes hand in hand with his push to repeal child labor laws for cheap labor, reimbursed through Medicaid.

Maine to Launch Child Abuse Prevention Effort - A Mary Mayhew Photo Opportunity

Attn World!!!  Gov. LePage declares April Child Abuse and Neglect Awareness Month

Ever notice that the one department in DHHS that never gets the proper conservative criticism regarding cost or efficiency is The Department of Children and Families, AKA Child Protective Services and Maine's Foster Care System?

Sure, they'll take away your drug treatment, cut off your food stamps, and even put thousands at risk of loosing their psych meds by pulling their health care out from under them...  But God forbid you say anything about the cruel and sadistic frauds who are supposed to protect Maine's most vulnerable children from abuse or neglect and instead bounce them from home to home; dope them up on psych meds and cut them off from any and all contact with their friends and families, and in some cases abuse them so that they end up in the teen shelters and on the streets of Portland just to avoid being in the system.  Nope, these are wonderful people deserving of our love and respect.  They should be placed on the highest of pedestals and we should give them raises and glorify their names!

In ceremonies kicking off Child Abuse Awareness Month, Maine Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew said that DHHS plans to launch a new initiative next year aimed at reducing child abuse. 

Maine to Launch Child Abuse Prevention Effort

New initiative?  What is that supposed to mean?

Next year, Mayhew said, DHHS will launch a new initiative that will seek to prevent child abuse by setting up a new unit of specially trained staff that will review all reported cases of abuse and neglect and assess all of the cases, with a mandate to establish specific action plans to address each case on an individual basis.

Didn't we already have that?  The workers who answer the phones at the Child Abuse Hotline perhaps?   Are they not specially trained to determine whether or not a report merits further investigation and are very liberal in that regard already?  Are their supervisors not trained to review these decisions?  Now they're going to set up a specific action plan based on every single call to the Child Abuse Hotline?

Okay so let me get this straight, so a call comes into the child abuse hotline, it is a self-righteous helicopter-parent who is concerned about their neighbors neglect because their kid stepped out onto the front porch without a jacket, now what do you do?  Do you send a social worker out there to do a state sponsored anal probe of the family?  Do you send them to Coats for Kids or even Goodwill with a voucher... oh wait never mind that's welfare.   No!  You add a whole new level of bureaucracy to create an action plan just because somebody made a phone call when just a few short years ago the state was bragging about being anational model child welfare system who excelled at keeping kids safe while in the home by setting up an individual safety plan specifically designed for every family based on the needs of that child and family when in many cases the best that could be done was to leave the family alone and focus on the kids who really are abused and neglected so that they don't fall through the cracks while social workers are off chasing shadows.

When did this all change so that they gotta address the problems now?  And how is it that Mary Mayhew can turn this all into a photo opportunity by suddenly deciding that this is necessary when the state has already increased the number of kids they snatch, and that we should now spend what will most likely be an awful lot of money to implement such a program and create action plans for every case?   

Considering the fact that teachers and health care providers are mandated to report every little scrape on the knee, they're bound to be busy.

What a pathetic waste of time and money by the utterly clueless who should learn to leave well enough alone or let those with the right expertise to handle it.  But hey, if you can convince them that it will keep kids safe, the legislature will overwhelmingly vote for it because they will otherwise be chastised as being anti-child or pro-child abuse for voting against it.

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Maine's Medicaid Publishing of Errors

Whether if it is the States of Pennsylvania, Michigan or Maine, I cease to be amazed at the complete and utter relentlessness of its leadership by failing to admit that they do not know what the hell they are doing.


Maine has taken fiscal responsibility to a place only one state has gone before.  Nebraska.


The State of Nebraska was the first state to go into federal receivership for its Medicaid fraud.  Michigan was to be second, but the state's cash cow got out her white out and shredders and made the big bad feds go away for three more years.


But I digress.

Paul LePage
Oxymoronic Political King

Governor Paul LePage has come to be a man for whom I have deeply fallen.  It is his seductive statements of fiscally responsible policy which quickly strips him of any cogent credibility of administrative leadership when the "errors" are published.


New DHHS Leadership Uncovers Budget Errors

Tens-of-Millions in additional funds likely required in fiscal year ending June 30, 2011. LePage Administration formulating a new Supplemental Budget to address budget errors.

Augusta, Maine – Maine Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew briefed legislators today on financial management deficiencies her new leadership team has discovered as they have transitioned into their positions with Maine’s largest state agency. Work is on-going to determine the total scope of the problem and to make reforms needed to better administer department programs.

The three issues discussed today are as follows:

$66 Million in over-budget payments to Maine Hospitals: 
DHHS moved to a new claims processing system in September 2010 – the Maine Integrated Health Management Solution (MIHMS) -- and many acute hospitals were transitioned to Diagnosis Related Grouping (DRG) payments.

At that time, the department failed to make corresponding changes to the hospital weekly Prospective Interim Payments (PIP) to account for what was being paid out through the new processing system. Consequently, DHHS is on pace to overpay the hospitals by $119 Million by this fiscal year’s end.

Corrective Steps:   DHHS is sending a letter to hospital administrators today announcing immediate changes to stay within budget for the fiscal year. Beginning March 19, 2011, claims will be processed with payments withheld for hospital based physicians’ claims, crossover claims and DRG claims.

PIPs and some claims payments will be adjusted to reflect payments over the budgeted amount of $378.6 million back to each hospital. If payments to a hospital exceed its budgeted amount, the settlement payments authorized by the Supplemental Budget enacted earlier in the year will be adjusted. The full letter to hospital administrators will be released later today.

$10 million spike in weekly claims to MaineCare providers:
In the last six weeks the weekly payments made to MaineCare providers have jumped from an average of $39 million per week for the first 24 weekly payment cycles to $49 million. If the trend continues, MaineCare will exceed its annual budget in this fiscal year by $30 million or more.

Corrective Steps: The department has notified the Legislature of the increase in MaineCare Cycle Expenditures and is analyzing the potential contributing factors and determining the potential impact on the current fiscal year’s budget.

Once Commissioner Mayhew’s new leadership team has finished its analysis, a supplemental budget submission will likely be required to bridge the pending shortfall in the MaineCare program. Changes may also be required in Governor LePage’s 2012-2013 biennial budget submission to account for the higher trend in payments to MaineCare providers.

$29.7 Million Targeted Case management Law Suit:
DHHS recently lost an appeal of disallowance by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for certain Medicaid expenses in federal fiscal years 2002 and 2003 which would require the state to pay back $29.7 million in federal reimbursement received for case management services to children in foster care and in the child protective system. A briefing memo from DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew is available to the media.

Corrective Steps: DHHS is considering whether to file an appeal in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston and working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on changes to its Targeted Case Management policy.

“We knew we faced many challenges with the Department of Health and Human Services when we took office,” said Maine Governor Paul LePage. “Commissioner Mayhew and her new leadership team are finding a disturbing number of problems at the department that we have to address. Additional audits and reviews are being conducted and we will promptly disclose new information as it is developed.”

“We are still assessing the problems, but we wanted to let the public and lawmakers know right away what we are facing. We inherited a big mess, but we are going to get it fixed and find solutions that work for consumers, providers and the taxpayers,” added the Governor.

“The mess we are finding at DHHS is another reason the Legislature should move the start of our biennium to the second year of each Legislature,” said Governor LePage. “New Governors and lawmakers need time to truly assess the operations of state government before having to prepare new budget submissions. I urge quick action on Representative Ayotte’s bill, LD 381 - An Act to Establish a New Method of Determining the State Budget.”

Briefing Memo on Maine Targeted Case Management Appeal to Federal Decision to Pay Back $29.7 for Medicaid F...

Stay tuned, I will secure and publish the PACER documents of the case, shortly.
HHS Appellate Decision on Maine Department of Health and Human Services 2009 Targeted Case Management

Maine Busted In University Child Welfare Training Fraud Scheme

For those of you who do not remember and the rest who do not know, there was a New York case, not so long ago where the Judge said a university did nothing wrong in its training and billing practices of child welfare.

I suppose Judge Hurd ought to read this because Cornel and the New York Office of Children and Family Services were using the exact same fraud scheme.

Maine Governor LePage with his nominee Mary Mayhew,

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The State agency claimed Title IV-E training costs totaling $2,495,375 (Federal share) that were allowable, supported, and allocated in accordance with Federal requirements. However, the State agency did not always follow Federal requirements in claiming training costs. Specifically, the State agency improperly claimed:

• $263,659 in State employee salaries and University educational costs that were not related to the Title IV-E training program;

• $474,270 in State administrative and University educational costs that were allocated incorrectly to the Title IV-E training program; and

• $45,668 in indirect costs that did not qualify for reimbursement at the enhanced rate.

As a result, the State agency overstated the Federal share of foster care and adoption assistance training costs by $783,597. The overstatements occurred because the State agency made clerical errors that improperly allocated, coded, and calculated Title IV-E

It must be noted that Mary Mayhew was a former lobbyist for Hospitals and picked by Governor Paul Le Page who had this to say:

He went on to say that Mayhew is a valuable part of his team because of her knowledge and experience in the field of health care.

Review of Maine’s Title IV-E Training Costs for Federal Fiscal Years 2008 Through 2010
Trust me, the rest of the States are doing this.