Hello, this is Governor Janet Mills, and thank you for listening.
Well, last week, the president signed into law a mega bill that will have devastating consequences for our hospitals, our rural communities, our economy, our energy costs, and our balanced state budget. I support the desire for sensible policies that would lower taxes for hardworking people, that would foster economic growth, and exercise fiscal restraint -- but slashing essential services like this federal law does will do the opposite.
While the president called it a, "Big, Beautiful Bill", really, there's nothing beautiful about it in my view. To finance a tax cut for the very wealthy, this new law shifts enormous costs from the federal government to the states. Costs that we simply cannot absorb.
This federal law will effectively deny food to hungry children, and prevent people from seeing a doctor, and prevent doctors from being paid. Nearly 400,000 Maine people have health insurance through Medicaid, which we call MaineCare, including tens of thousands of children and people dealing with cancer, diabetes and heart care. People who need preventative care too, to avoid thousands in costs later on in life.
In some rural parts of our state, like Aroostook County, Washington County, Somerset, and Piscataquis counties, about 40% of the population rely on MaineCare for health insurance. Tens of thousands of Maine people also rely on health insurance through our state marketplace called CoverME.gov, and that's funded by the federal Affordable Care Act.
The vast majority of those people who receive the health coverage through MaineCare or in the marketplace are working to support themselves and their families. And many people were shifted off of MaineCare last year to go on to the marketplace. Now that coverage is at risk as well. By creating new barriers to enrolling in or staying enrolled in health care coverage, and by cutting billions of dollars in Medicaid funds over the next decade, the president's new mega law makes it likely that tens of thousands of people in our state will lose their health insurance. That will put their health care and their lives needlessly at risk.
And as more people are without affordable insurance, the premiums and out-of-pocket costs for everyone else who has insurance will go up, either through their employer or through the marketplace. Hospitals across Maine, then, will have to bear more of the cost of providing health care for people without insurance. Many hospitals, especially those in rural areas where MaineCare enrollment is highest, may curtail services or even close, leaving folks without access to care, and leaving communities without some of their largest employers.
This new law doesn't just impact health care in Maine. It also denies food to hungry children by cutting federal funding for food assistance programs like SNAP to the tune of millions of dollars a year. On top of cutting federal funding for SNAP in Maine, this new law also requires Maine to pay millions more a year to administer the program, a double hit that the State of Maine budget can't afford. So food for hundreds of thousands of Maine people, including tens of thousands of kids, is at risk.
The new law also hurts families by ending clean energy and energy efficiency tax credits and funding, which will increase energy costs and will slow down our clean energy sector, which has been creating thousands of good paying jobs and helping us wean ourselves off of big oil for home heat. We're the most heating oil dependent state in the nation, and we have one of the nation's oldest housing stocks, so we absolutely need to diversify our energy supply if we can ever hope to bring down the cost of home heat and energy costs generally. The loss of federal clean energy initiatives in the president's mega bill is a major setback to those efforts.
At the same time, the new mega law creates trillions of dollars in increases in the federal deficit, creating long term costs for all Americans -- this partisan mega bill, rushed to enactment to meet the president's artificial deadline, and enacted by a one vote margin in the US Senate.
Over the coming weeks, we'll be reviewing the final language of this law to determine the full scope of the damage that it will cause, including its impact on our otherwise balanced state budget, and what actions we might take to protect the health and safety of Maine people, protect our state's financial future, and the stability of Maine's economy.
This is Governor Janet Mills, and thank you for listening.