The LePage administration’s Department of Health and Human Services has hired the Alexander Group to study MaineCare, including accepting federal funds to provide health care for 69,500 Mainers.

Taxpayers are paying this out-of-state consulting group $925,000 to tell the administration what it wants to hear. The group is biased toward cutting programs, an observation based on its leader’s history in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.

Information available from the Alexander Group includes recommendations for cuts. I hope I am wrong here.

Maybe it’ll come back and agree with me that health care is a human right, and that accepting federal funds for MaineCare will create jobs and bring federal money into the state.

Those aren’t just my thoughts. The Maine Equal Justice Partners and the Maine Center for Economic Policy have analyzed the impacts of accepting federal funds to expand MaineCare, and state that doing so would “create more than 3,100 new jobs and stimulate over $350 million in annual economic activity by 2016. It will increase state and local revenues by close to $18 million a year.”

Maybe the Alexander Group will actually look at the evidence and recommend that the LePage administration embrace accepting federal funds for health care. I’m afraid it won’t. I’m afraid that its history will repeat itself here in Maine.

We need to look at the source and follow the money.

The source of the recommendations will be the Alexander Group, hired by the LePage administration for almost a million dollars.

Access to health care shouldn’t be denied.

Heidi Brooks, Lewiston

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