Maine Wire Monday's

Monday morning. Everybody's favorite time of the week is now as Mr. Steve Robinson, editor-in-chief of the main wire, and of course the Robinson report as well, both of which you should check out online right now, is with us to have a conversation over what's going on in Maine politics. Steve Robinson, how is Monday morning for you, sir? So fantastic. As always, the main wire continues to be the straw that turns the drink in the state of Maine. Indeed it does. Nowhere was that more apparent than last week when, obviously, I think it was Monday. You had Dr. Oz visiting the state, and he did many things while he was here. He met with former Governor Lepage, who's running for Congress in the second district. He also had an extensive conversation with the main wire, which seemed to, I don't know, trigger. the Mills administration a little bit because they were none too pleased about the fact that that conversation happened. And I'm not surprised because it was about fraud. It was about what the Mills administration has and frankly has not done about the issue of fraud. And they rather defensively started listing all the things that they were doing to fight fraud because if you didn't know this, Steve Robinson, Janet Mills and her administration is the chief fraud fighters of our time. I've come to learn that. Tell me a little bit, sir, about your reaction to all that. Well, it's always a great moment when you can trick government bureaucrats into telling on themselves, which is what really happened here. Dr. Oz appeared with the mainwires John Featherston out in front of Paradise Residential Services, which we broke the story on back in March that they had terminated their main care provider agreement due to significant deficiencies. At the time, we were able to visit some of those houses and talk with some of the people and some of the former employees who said that... They were skirting employee verification, which was kind of a big deal, considering that the company almost exclusively hired Central African asylum seekers. So they're essentially hiring illegal aliens who didn't speak English to come into these houses where they would pretend to be caretakers for adults with autism. That was the racket that this company was running. And at the time, we knew, based on federal Medicaid data, these guys were making $400,000 per year. for every disabled person in their care. That's $800,000 for every two bedroom house that they could purchase and convert into a main care group home. It seems a little unusual, Steve. It seems a little unusual. It's not just a theme. They were in the 95th percentile for all residential care businesses nationally. Across the country, Paradise Build more than 95% of all adult autism group homes. Somehow that didn't ping the BS detectors at the Department of Health and Human Services. But the story gets worse because it... What the Mills administration did last week was put out a blog post essentially saying, here's all the things we've done about these, about Medicaid fraud, pretending like there was some new crackdown. What they referred to was all stuff that had happened, you know, a long time ago, including as far back to December 2025 when they'd terminated funding for Gateway Community Services.

So this is like, you know, when your wife is nagging you for not doing chores, saying, you know, I mowed the lawn four months ago. What do you want me to do? Right? You know, I'm cracking down on this stuff. So she's effectively putting out this vanilla blog post with no details. So, of course, we immediately file a Freedom of Access Act request for all of the letters they claim to have sent out. And again, most of it is just all old stuff. But there are a few cases where we get some new details about stories that we've been working on, stories we've already published, that are, you know, should shock the conscience of all Mainers. And this Paradise Residential Care story is one of them because what the state alleges is that after, in October of 2024, after Carol Wage, who was quoted in the Mainwire story in the March, came to them and said, there are severe deficiencies here. They're not training employees. There's a violation of disability rights. There's fraud going on. The state laxadaisically started sending inspectors to these places. And then all of a sudden in December, when the main wire starts doing videos out in front of these houses, when the Medicaid fraud national firestorm is really picking up, the state visits all of the Paradise's facilities in rapid succession, and then a few months later terminates their funding agreement. So this really looks like a state that is, or an administration that is spinning to pretend like it's cracking down on fraud and really knew about a lot of these problems for a long time and was willing to turn the blind eye to him. But you've got, you know, 15 to 20 residents at this autism home and several others where there is deplorable conditions for these people. They talked in the letter about. You know, feces on the floor, broken glass, disabled adults left just completely by themselves in a setting where they're supposed to have 24-7 care, where we are paying, the taxpayer is paying for 24-7 care. So, again, the Mills administration tricked into telling on themselves. And I think the most cynical part of this, Matt, is that the two termination letters where the Mills administration said alleged fraud against autism providers. Those letters were sent on the same exact day Mills released a campaign video attacking Dr. Oz as a TV doctor and saying that the Trump administration's focus on Medicaid fraud was all just a political stunt. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Same exact day. Same exact day. And, you know, the other thing that's really striking about all this to me, Steve, is that... I feel like the messaging from the Mills folks and from really the left in general has been very confused anyway because for a pretty fair amount of time we were told there is no fraud, that this is like a politically minded attack trying to generate a story that doesn't really exist where, you know, this rampant fraud is happening and, you know, where it does happen, you know, we go after it and we do, you know, a couple token things here and there just to prove that we do. But there really isn't this big problem. You're just saying there is to try to go after. after us. And then now we're at a place where, you know, it's obvious that there is. And you can't really deny that there is, although they kind of still try. And they're really now trying to make the argument that since there is, we're the ones, we're the chief ones fighting it because look at all these things we've done to shut off the providers. It's just a kind of very confused message, I think.

coming from them. Yeah, it's not happening. Okay, it's happening a little bit, but we've taken care of it. You know, pretty soon they'll be the champions of Medicaid reform. You know, just wait until they want to form a new government bureaucracy to crack down on this stuff. But, you know, the problem is that the Mills administration and I think state governments across the country miscalculated because they thought that they had a monopoly on the data and the records and the evidence that. points toward Medicaid fraud, but the Trump administration effectively overruled them by releasing the federal payments data. So we have very detailed granular data showing monthly claims level data to all of these providers. And we have the tools to be able to digest that data. So we can slice it, you know, 10 different ways and run, you know, 10 different analyses over it. to see exactly where the financial outliers are. And if the Mills administration isn't adopting these tools, hint, they're not, they should be because they make it very easy to see where the financial outliers are. In Maine, you have one group of Maine care providers clustered in the middle, and then you have a huge group of Maine care providers that arrived in Maine in 2020, and they're billing in the 95th percentile. They all happen to be, you know, quote unquote, new Mainers, recent entrance into the state. main care entrepreneurs, however you want to call them. But we expanded Medicaid multiple times under Janet Mills' governor. A whole bunch of providers showed up in the state, and they're almost entirely responsible for the growth in main care spending. And it's not a coincidence that at the beginning of 2025, the state started with a $118 million structural gap is what the Mills administration said. So we had to go out and raise taxes on cannabis and streaming services and hospitals and all these things. when in fact it was just a fraud debt. Just with the Medicaid fraud that has been reported so far, if you took that out of the equation, that probably pays for the entire $118 million between Gateway, Paradise, and beyond residential care, which you'll hear about later this afternoon. Steve Robinson joining us as we talk about what's going on in Maine right now and that conversation is fraud related right now. You know, Steve, as you just told that story here, kind of brings up in my mind the question of what caused this or how did this happen. Obviously, being asleep at the wheel and not really caring, which I think is the accurate description of the Mills administration, is a pretty big part of this. But I think you just touched on a really important element of this that a lot of people maybe ignore, which is what happens when you start... a gigantic flow of money and it becomes apparent to a lot of people that if they start a nonprofit and they apply for, you know, subsidies or funding from the government, and if they're in particular favored groups, that the spigot of cash can be turned on to them and there will be very little oversight of it. If you make that decision, if you do that kind of thing, you create a gigantic program with no oversight and then just let it happen, it's almost like you're inviting. this kind of thing. And this is really behind the story of how this whole scheme really got to start it up.

Yes, I think that the Mills administration expanded Medicaid as her very first act in office, added 100,000 able-bodied childless adults to Medicaid. Then again, the Troy Jackson, the Democratic legislature and the governor expanded Medicaid again to a broader class of non-citizens. They redefined 18 and 19-year-olds as children for the sake of maximizing Medicaid benefits. And the message to the quote unquote Medicaid entrepreneurs was clear. The flow of money is coming. And once that flow of money is there, there's a certain amount of it that will be rededicated to protecting that money stream and to expanding that money stream. So we've dumped more and more Medicaid money into the state thinking that it's going to improve health. What we've been measuring, what the Democratic majority has been measuring is the number of people on Medicaid as opposed to better health outcomes. You never hear anyone talking about improved obesity rates or lower addiction rates or improved healthcare outcomes. It's all about how many people have been covered or how many people are on welfare. If you measure the health of the state but the number of people on welfare, it's very easy to put a lot of people on welfare. It's harder to improve the health of people through public policy. And this plays right in as well to the discussion of the closure of all the birthing centers around the state. Yes, it does. I mean, this Paradise Residential Care from 2022 to 2025 billed nearly $25 million to provide housing for 15 people. And we've talked with some of these people. They're not high medical needs. These are some people that, you know, could live independently, people who just need, you know, a little bit of help and could live and work independently, the ones that we've interviewed and talked with at least. $25 million to provide care for 15 people, right? How much of a maternity ward could that sustain? if we had a better way of approaching how we deal with a population of autistic adults and adults with intellectual and developmental disorders, about 30, just a little over 3,000 adults here in the state of Maine. It's the most expensive Medicaid program. It's the fastest growing Medicaid program, and it's the Medicaid program where we see the most new Mainers entering. post-2019, and then their firms just proliferate in billing, and they're at the 95th percentile for all Medicaid billing. We're running a little low on time, Steve, but I want one more question in before I get rid of you. The presence of Dr. Oz here in the state obviously brought a lot of this attention and, again, kind of go to the Mills administration into making those statements. What is the federal government doing about this right now, though? I know that you guys have talked to them significantly about, you know, sort of the investigations, possible prosecutions, how they're viewing states and what they're doing, particularly Minnesota and Maine. What is going on from their point of view right now?

Well, my guess is that there's a lot more happening behind the scenes than we're seeing publicly. The Mills administration probably has some indication of this or else they wouldn't be releasing the information that they're releasing. Seems like they're trying to get ahead of a wave of bad news stories. And I think that the state has the attention of the CMS administrator and the Trump administration in a bad way. you know, Minnesota, New York, California. Those were all states mentioned in JD Vance's fraud task force press conference. Maine also was mentioned. So it seems like they're working their way down the checklist. Indeed they are. And we'll keep talking about this, I'm sure, because this story is not going away. Steve Robinson is with us every Monday. Appreciate it, sir. Make sure you check out the reports on the Robinson Report and the main wire right now. We'll talk next Monday, sir. Thanks a lot. Thank you, sir.