Perhaps the 126th Legislature will be remembered as the legislative session all about welfare reform that resulted in no legislative welfare reform.
And, while welfare is often portrayed as a giant rolling snowball in Maine, the program that drew the most legislative attention in the last session is actually a shadow of what it was 20 years ago.
Republicans Gov. Paul LePage and House Republican Leader Ken Fredette, R-Newport, began the session by proposing a series of minor changes designed, they felt, to tighten up on the distribution of various public benefits to poor people.
During the middle of the session, the governor made available a voluminous report showing that welfare cash is sometimes obtained in places that sell smokes, alcohol and lottery tickets.
That record also showed that a tiny fraction of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families money distributed in the state was spent outside Maine, most of it in New Hampshire, which makes sense.
Democrats had a welfare reform bill of their own, this one aimed at making Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services collect more information on its efforts to find fraud committed by Maine Medicaid providers.
Maine Attorney General Janet Mills had put out a report showing that Maine has collected way more fraud reimbursement money from big providers, mainly drug companies, than it has from individuals.
Most of those collections have been initiated by the federal government, and Maine has simply shared in the bounty, which has run into the millions.
The provider fraud bill cleared both houses of the Legislature, and is now on the governor’s desk.
Democrats were on the welfare-fraud defensive during most of the session, which may have been the Republican strategy. It’s a hot-button issue with voters, and just talking about it is popular.
Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans were fond of saying that a single dollar spent fraudulently is one dollar too much. Although any sane person knows there is a certain amount of fraud in every human endeavor, and eradicating it all is a practical impossibility.
Democrats declared nearly all of LePage and Fredette’s ideas for welfare reform either impractical, ineffectual or a political ploy.
The governor, they said, had declared “war on poor people” for political purposes.
Two small changes did occur, one after the Sun Journal pointed out that nothing on the electronic benefits transfer card or in a brochure given to recipients said cash should not be spent on alcohol, tobacco or lottery tickets.
In fact, the brochure said the cash benefit TANF money on the card could be used to buy “anything.”
And another: The governor figured out that he could require photo IDs on EBT cards without the Legislature’s approval, and will do so.
The Department of Human Services soon corrected this on the state’s website
So, not much really changed about the way welfare is disbursed in this state, despite all the bluster.
Welfare fraud is a hot-button topic with voters, and not just in Maine. Americans everywhere feel their state is too generous and has become a magnet for the undeserving poor.
Never mind that the conservative Cato Institute last year determined that Maine was less generous than 41 other states. Massachusetts, New York and practically every other state in the Northeast offers a more generous package of benefits to the poor.
It might surprise some to know that we have been reforming welfare in Maine for more than 50 years. The first reference we could find for welfare reform in the Sun Journal archives appeared in 1957.
While Republicans are most often associated with calls to trim welfare benefits, the only clear and lasting welfare reform actually occurred when a Democratic president teamed up with a Republican Congress to “end welfare as we know it.”
And they did.
In 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton worked with Congress to pass the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.“
For the first time, it put a five-year limit on TANF benefits and created a variety of work and training requirements for recipients.
The result was immediate and dramatic.
In 1992, 67,000 Mainers received welfare (TANF) benefits. By 1998, that had dropped to 38,000 recipients in Maine.
Since 2009, we have leveled off at about 22,000 TANF recipients, and that’s a 66 percent decrease since 1992.
Whatever happened in this legislative session, it wasn’t welfare reform.
But don’t expect the issue to go away; the long campaign season is just before us.
rrhoades@sunjournal.com
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