Press Herald - Congressional bills that would slash Medicaid would not only result in thousands of Mainers becoming uninsured but would also worsen the precarious financial health of Maine’s hospitals, threatening more closures and service cutbacks. The state’s hospitals are already teetering under current financial conditions.
Half of Maine’s 24 rural hospitals are at risk of closing, according to the Center for Quality and Patient Reform think tank, without factoring in further cuts to Medicaid.
And two of the state’s rural hospitals — Northern Light A.R. Gould Hospital in Presque Isle and Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital in Ellsworth — would be among 338 rural hospitals across the nation most at risk of closing in the near future if the bill passed, according to a national analysis of hospitals by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Many hospitals are looking into the abyss,” said Steven Michaud, president of the Maine Hospital Association.