Maine Democratic chair: Republican smears can’t change the reality – Paul LePage failed Maine

This weekend on the Maine Republican conference, Paul LePage and his marketing campaign are going to placed on a present full of lies. You’ll hear election misinformation, accusations that Democrats are cartoon villains and baseless smears about Gov. Janet Mills. However maybe probably the most ridiculous and least credible lie that they’ll push is that Maine was higher off when LePage was within the Blaine Home.

Whereas some Republicans could really feel nostalgia for the LePage period, Mainers don’t. That’s as a result of LePage’s eight-year tenure as governor was full of catastrophic failures on the problems Maine individuals care about most – failures that now we have not forgotten.

We’ve not forgotten how LePage’s failures put our well being in danger. For eight years, LePage blocked our state from increasing Medicaid, vetoing it 5 instances towards the need of Maine voters and in the end stopping 90,000 individuals from accessing well being protection. He fought tooth and nail towards requiring insurance coverage firms to cowl preventive care and most cancers screening, and forfeited federal funds to assist psychological well being providers within the state. He additionally decimated our public well being system, refusing to fill dozens of public well being nurse vacancies. Throughout his tenure, Maine dropped from the eighth-healthiest state within the nation to sixteenth, and the state noticed a soar within the share of people that averted accessing well being care due to excessive prices.

Mainers additionally is not going to overlook LePage’s failure to steer our financial system. Underneath LePage, Maine struggled to get better from the Nice Recession, rating forty ninth in job development as measured by the share of jobs recovered from the earlier recession and nonetheless had one of many “slowest rising economies” within the nation by 2016. Even because the job market languished, LePage did little to assist Maine employees get by, preventing efforts to broaden job coaching packages and lift wages. He additionally needlessly forfeited near $2 billion in federal sources, which estimates mentioned would have helped create 4,800 jobs yearly. These failures are why the Bangor Every day Information editorial board referred to LePage’s tenure as “eight years of financial stagnation.”

In fact, LePage’s failures weren’t restricted to well being care and the financial system.

He proposed chopping thousands and thousands from public training funding and was dubbed an “enemy of public training” by the Press Herald editorial board after he repeatedly attacked Maine academics.

He did little to guard Maine’s surroundings, vetoing a variety of makes an attempt to fight the local weather disaster, whereas concurrently launching an “assault” on Maine’s environmental protections and inspiring offshore drilling.

Commercial

And because the state was ravaged by the opioid disaster, he stubbornly fought efforts to make life-saving overdose prevention medicine extensively accessible, placing Maine lives in peril.

In 2018, drained after eight years of LePage’s failures, Maine voters despatched Gov. Mills to the Blaine Home to repair the issues her predecessor left behind. On problem after problem, Gov. Mills has delivered. Whereas LePage obstructed well being care entry, she expanded it for greater than 90,000 Mainers and rebuilt our public well being system – main one of many strongest COVID responses within the nation. Whereas LePage left Maine floundering years after the Nice Recession, below Gov. Mills, Maine’s financial restoration from the pandemic has been an instance even Republicans are pointing to as a hit. And whereas LePage failed to completely fund training and did little to cease the local weather and opioid crises from devastating our state, Gov. Mills has made report investments in all three.

It doesn’t matter what lies and smears are spun this weekend in Augusta, Republicans can not change the truth, which is that Paul LePage’s tenure in workplace was an abject failure on problem after problem. After being elected to wash up the mess LePage left behind, Gov. Mills did simply that. Now that she has steered Maine onto a path for a brighter future, we can not afford to show again.