Something wicked this way comes: Literal (literal!) Mayhem heads to the Medicaid program

Among the first providers I bumped into at Medtrade last week: The Feiersteins.

You know Lisa and Steve of Active Healthcare fame. They sold their sleep business and now focus on nebulizers and certain diabetes supplies.

We stopped to chat for several minutes about the direction this industry is going in, what's going to be the next big thing (retail? Probably not) and eventually, Medicaid.

Well! It so happens that the Maine-based HME News team had literally (literally!) just learned news that should strike terror into the hearts of pretty much everyone who isn't healthy and wealthy.

So, pretty much everyone.

You see, we had just heard (literally!) that non other than Mary Mayhew (often referred to in these parts as Mary Mayhem), has, in true Trumpian, fox-meet-henhouse style, been appointed as the new director of the federal Medicaid program.

Oy!

Mayhew, former commissioner of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, boasts a tenure that includes cutting, cutting and more cutting. Cutting programs, cutting services, cutting reimbursement rates. Cutting was all she cared about.

Her slash-and-burn approach to the programs meant to help our society's most vulnerable has left disaster in her wake (in a fit of hubris worthy of, well many politicians, Mayhew left her post to run for governor, despite being a deeply unpopular figure in the state).

There's so much more I could say, but I think the best I can do for all my unsuspecting HME News readers is provide a link to a recent editorial summing up her utter failure at DHHS.

"Mary Mayhew brings Maine failures to Washington"

Consider yourselves warned.