PORTLAND — One of Maine’s largest providers of personal care support for the elderly and disabled announced that it is ending service in Maine.

The Portland Press Herald reported that MAS Home Care of Maine said Wednesday that on July 29, it will be discontinuing the home care services it provides that receive all or part of their funding from MaineCare.

About 1,000 clients are affected.

The move could put personal support specialists out of work, while their clients would have to find other providers.

MAS Home Care of Maine president and chief executive Ken Johnson says his staff is working on a transition plan that will move those workers to other home care agencies, which would allow them to potentially remain with clients they already serve.

The decision has left SeniorsPlus in Lewiston scrambling to help clients through the transition. Its Elder Independence of Maine Division coordinates care for all of the nearly 1,000 elderly and disabled Mainers who rely on MAS for personal care, like bathing and dressing.

SeniorsPlus is now working with the Maine Department of Health and Human Services to try to keep clients and personal support workers together as workers accept jobs with new home care agencies.

“I’m hoping a high, high, high percentage of (clients) want to stay with the same workers and those workers easily get hired by these other agencies,” said SeniorsPlus Executive Director Betsy Sawyer-Manter.

She believes there are enough providers in Maine to handle the clients MAS is giving up — for now.

“If this were to happen again, I don’t know,” Sawyer-Manter said.

She called the state’s MaineCare reimbursement rate “a big part of the problem.” At $15 an hour, the rate is too low and has been for a long time, she said.

“That’s got to cover everything from worker training to insurance to wages to overhead,” she said. “And that’s not very much money.” 

The new state budget sets aside a little more than $4 million to help increase rates, she said, but she believes that’s not enough.

“This is the tip of the iceberg, I think, in terms of needing to really pay attention to what we do for care of older adults in the state of Maine,” she said.

Sun Journal Staff Writer Lindsay Tice contributed to this story.