LEWISTON — Places such as Lewiston need more help from federal resources as they try to counter mounting challenges, Graham Platner told the Sun Journal while campaigning in the city last week.

Platner, who was in Lewiston the day Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, cementing his place as the heavy favorite to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November, said in an interview that the federal government should push more funding into areas that are struggling with housing shortages and healthcare.

More needs to be done to support rural areas as well, Platner said, so their residents don’t have to come to Lewiston to get services.

Bigger cities’ challenges with homelessness, poverty and unemployment, Platner said, are fueled in part by problems in the rural areas, which do not have the services and resources for people to rehabilitate and thrive.

“I think on the whole, (we need to) look at it realistically, and try to change the larger model, provide healthcare, better and more affordable housing options, more options for people to make a living wage in even rural areas,” Platner said. “Then you’d see less of that.”

“In the end, you get what you pay for in society, and we’re not paying people enough,” he said. 

In the short term, Platner said, the answer is to call on the federal government to provide municipalities and regions with the resources needed to deal with struggling populations. 

Lewiston is going through its first property revaluation in 38 years and is facing the prospect of a 2027 budget that could increase more than inflation. As housing prices rise and residents seek more affordable housing outside the city, regions within commuting distance of Lewiston could experience increases of their own. 

HOUSING AND HEALTHCARE

“The real answer here is investing in building housing. That’s from the federal level, the support that we can give to states and municipalities,” Platner said, adding that the federal government has “abdicated in providing resources” to build more housing. 

“I think it’s a combination of going after the use of housing as a speculative financial asset, not allowing private equity and hedge funds and private companies to buy up single-family housing to turn it into rentals, but also building more housing and providing the resources to do it.”

High healthcare costs are adding to residents’ burden, said Platner, who supports a Medicare for All plan, essentially a fully funded federal universal healthcare system.

“Unfulfilled reimbursements … leave these locally owned institutions struggling significantly, cutting back services like St. Mary’s has had to do recently,” Platner said. He said the short-term solution is to “pump money in through updated reimbursement rates, but also providing funds from the federal level to reopen hospitals and to expand services.

“We certainly aren’t using the reimbursement rate system effectively, to keep hospitals like this open. They rely on Medicaid and Medicare money. I mean, that’s kind of the baseline of much of our rural hospital system and management.”

Unfulfilled reimbursement rates usually end in cuts to personnel and services, making access to healthcare more difficult, he said.

“Now you don’t have the people on hand to do clinical rotations, so you don’t even have people staying, being able to train at these hospitals,” Platner said. “I was talking to a bunch of folks at (the University of New England’s) med school about the fact that there are a ton of people that want to live and work in rural Maine. It’s just that there aren’t the positions for them primarily because of reimbursement rates that remain low.”

Platner also said when national healthcare companies come onto the scene like Prime Healthcare Foundation has with Central Maine Medical Center, the question of local healthcare becomes more complex. He said he does not believe national institutions should own any of Maine’s healthcare systems because they focus on profit over maximizing services to the public.

‘VIBRANT, HEALTHY ECONOMIES’

Platner, an oysterman from the coastal town of Sullivan, said his familiarity with the maritime industry gives him hope for the future of Maine’s entire economy. Lobstering, he said, is the perfect example of how “policy begets very specific outcomes.”

There is one boat, one captain, one license, while capping licenses and the number of traps lobster fishermen can have, he said. Nobody is allowed to create corporations and every single boat is its own individual company, he said, keeping everyone in tune with the health of the industry. 

“I think if we took that way of thinking, and apply it to farming on land, if we apply it to farming at sea, if we apply it to our forestry products, if we think about how do we craft policy to incentivize an outcome that’s going to result in local ownership and keeping a lot of the money here in the state of Maine, (we can create) ancillary industries around these things that create vibrant, healthy economies.”

Platner has made it clear he would “tax the millionaires and billionaires” to pay for needed federal services to states and communities. But he said part of the funding solution is to stop “magicking money into existence” to pay for war. 

The government has spent a low estimate of $25 billion so far on the conflict and nobody is asking how to pay for it, Platner said. He said that money should be going to public housing, universal healthcare, and other initiatives that increase American productivity.

Americans’ education, health and local economies would be better for it, he said. 

“While we do have to go after corporate wealth, where we have to go after billionaires and have to use the tax code to go after much of the wealth that’s been hoarded thus far, we also have to — using our ability to create public funds — not dump it into a bucket of blood in Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran,” said Platner, a combat veteran who served three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

“We need to be dumping it into our communities to build homes, to provide healthcare, to build schools, to provide childcare. All of those things are going to increase the productivity of the country, which, in the long run, is going to make us a much more wealthy place.”