DeSantis taps Mary Mayhew to lead Florida health agency

Mary Mayhew, director of the nation’s Medicaid program, is resigning after three months on the job to become Florida’s top health regulator, the state’s governor-elect announced.

As secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration, Mayhew will replace Justin Senior, who resigned in November to become CEO of the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida.

“With decades of experience and service throughout various leadership roles in both the private and public sectors, Mary Mayhew is a proven innovator and an effective leader in the field of health care," said Governor-elect Ron DeSantis in a statement on Friday. "Mary will be an outstanding Secretary who will bring bold and tested leadership to the Agency."

Mayhew was tapped in October by the Trump administration to oversee Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program at the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where she’s been responsible for the management of the $375 billion federal Medicaid program.

Before a gubernatorial run in 2018, she was the commissioner of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, where she improved the department’s budget, tightened the state’s Medicaid eligibility standards — eliminating nearly 70,000 people from Maine’s Medicaid program — and established herself as a staunch opponent of Medicaid expansion.

Joan Alker, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, said the appointment of Mayhew to AHCA is “extremely bad news” for Florida at the time when the state’s uninsured rate, especially among children, is increasing.

Meanwhile, outgoing Gov. Paul LePage has credited Mayhew with repairing finances at Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services.

“When I started, we were hemorrhaging red ink,” she told reporters in May 2017, according to Portland Press Herald. “It took a great deal of fortitude to make difficult decisions to prioritize limited resources so we could support the most vulnerable populations in our state.”

In the news release, DeSantis’ transition team said during her time in Maine, Mayhew “implemented innovative reforms to the agency, including transforming Medicaid’s transactional focus to an organizational structure focused on value, cost-effectiveness, and health system improvement, increasing focus on program integrity and fraud investigations and implementing a federal grant review process to strategically prioritize grant requests and to evaluate program accountability, among other accomplishments.”