The Maryland Department of Health is requesting $19.6 billion for its 2025 budget, about $250 million less than what it needed to operate in 2024.
Budget analysts stated that the savings came from a drop in Medicaid enrollment due to better economic conditions and the federal government stopping its automatic Medicaid enrollment when it ended the COVID-19 national emergency.
The budget sets aside $89 million to maintain funding for community and crisis services.
“That builds on the $107.5 million down payment that was made last year to improve access to behavioral health services,” MDH Secretary Laura Herrera Scott told members of the Senate Health and Human Services Subcommittee Monday.
The budget also earmarks $10 million to create a center for firearm violence prevention, that money is predicated on the General Assembly passing a bill to create the center.
Herrera Scott said one of MDH’s main goals is to continue to reduce its vacancies. The department has already moved from a 14% vacancy level to 11%.
“We have really been taking a multi prong approach to filling our vacancies, certainly for the merit positions,” she said. “We have been actively working on retention.”
The 2025 budget allows for 390 new positions and the conversion of more than 550 contractual roles to merit ones.
Herrera Scott also noted that MDH is continuing to recoup the $1.4 billion in funds a recent audit found the department missed out on getting back from the federal government.
As of November MDH accounted for all but about $244 million of the funds and expects to get almost all of the money back by the end of 2024.
The missing funds came to light after a report from the Maryland Office of Legislative Audits (OLA).
The report found the state’s health department did not properly track funds reimbursed by the federal government during the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the end of 20-22 about $3.5 billion dollars were unaccounted for. The department later recovered about $2.1 billion of those funds.
The missing cash came under the stewardship of former Republican Governor Larry Hogan, who left office last January.
