Walkersville resident Marlene Eyler, 74, works as a host at a restaurant and cares for her 20-year-old grandson who lives with her. And now she has to add the chore of finding a new Medicare insurance plan to her challenges.

Eyler, who learned recently that she will lose her Medicare Advantage plan with Aetna, is one of thousands of Maryland seniors expected to receive notice this month that their supplemental Medicare plans will no longer be available next year, sparking frustration, fear and confusion.

“I’m very happy with Aetna, I haven’t had any issues with them,” Eyler said. “I’m just frustrated with the state of Maryland that they can’t give the older people better insurance.”

Insurance carriers say that Maryland’s unique hospital system is costly for them to do business in, and several are reducing their coverage in the state or pulling out of counties entirely. But that leaves residents like Eyler forced to navigate finding a new health care plan for next year.

“I’m taking care of him,” she said of her grandson, “plus having to worry about all this insurance stuff. And I have to work because I can’t pay the bills without working.”

Dean Slaughter, a 70-year-old Annapolis resident, is tired of having to change Medicare Advantage plans year after year. He recently got a letter from Aetna as well, telling him that his plan will no longer be available in 2026.

“Now we get to sit down and do the dog-and-pony show – see what’s out there, which is not much to offer. The insurance companies are leaving the state of Maryland,” Slaughter said.

Industry experts say as many as 100,000 Medicare recipients in Maryland, like Slaughter and Eyler, will have to scramble to find a new health care plan by the end of the year or risk losing coverage at an age where many require costly medical care.

About a quarter of Maryland Medicare recipients use a supplemental program called Medicare Advantage that helps retirees use a private insurer for additional health coverage such as vision, dental and transportation assistance that the standard Medicare plans may not offer.

But there’s been a long-running problem that’s coming to a head: State officials and people in the health care industry say the Medicare Advantage market in Maryland is more expensive than in most other states because of Maryland’s unique hospital payment system.

In recent years, the state has offered insurers a grant to help cover some of their costs and encourage them to keep offering the coverage in the state. That grant is going away, however, and some insurance companies have shrunk their presence in the state as a result.

A spokesperson for Humana said that the insurance company will no longer offer one of its Medicare Advantage plans in five major Maryland jurisdictions.

“Humana has exited one Medicare Advantage plan in Maryland for next year,” according to the statement. “Beginning Jan. 1, 2026 … Humana Gold Plus SNP (HMO DSNP), will no longer be available in the following counties: Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford, Howard and Baltimore City.”

Humana says that those affected by the termination will maintain their current coverage through Dec. 31, 2025, but they will need to find new coverage during the Medicare Annual Election Period, which runs from Oct. 15 through Dec. 7, if they want coverage next year.

Aetna shrunk its Medicare Advantage coverage to just three counties next year.

“Each year, we assess our ability to meet the health care needs of our members and adjust our plans to ensure they can deliver an excellent and sustainable member experience,” a spokesperson for Aetna said in a written statement. “In 2026, in Maryland, we will offer Medicare Advantage in the following counties: Frederick, Harford and Montgomery.”

Part of the issue comes from Maryland’s unique Total Cost of Care hospital payment model, in which a state board called the Health Services Cost Review Commission (HSCRC) sets hospital rates. Under the current system, insurance carriers pay higher hospital rates than in other states and get reimbursed by the federal government for Medicare Advantage services at lower rates than elsewhere. Meanwhile, insurance carriers are unable to negotiate hospital rates under their plans.

As a result, it’s more expensive to use Medicare Advantage in Maryland than in other states, and Maryland seniors aren’t getting the same quality of benefits, a spokesperson for CareFirst said in a recent statement.

Insurers reducing their footprint in the state leaves residents like Jie Shen, a 68-year-old living in Cockeysville, having to look for a new plan. That often means finding new doctors and hospitals for health care services.

“This is getting very frustrating,” Shen said. “I just want to stay on one plan at this point. I don’t know which one to choose.”

While there is time to search for a new plan, Medicare Advantage recipients note that the options available in Maryland are dwindling as carriers pull out of the state.

“It’s a hassle,” Slaughter said. “All of a sudden, you’re working with people who don’t even know you, and it’s not the way I want it … I feel like I am a number, and a cattle in line instead of a person, and it’s degrading.”

Even those who will still have their plans in 2026 are worried about what may come down the pipeline later.

Sharon Vickers, 78-year-old resident of Pasadena, was relieved to hear that her Medicare Advantage plan with CareFirst will continue into next year.

“I was concerned. Especially since my husband has passed, not having someone to sit and talk about it and discuss it,” she said.

As many Medicare recipients do, she works with an insurance broker to help find appropriate coverage for her needs. The broker informed her that she would be “comfortable this year,” but that he couldn’t “guarantee anything for next year.”

But she feels that the Advantage plans are already too expensive for what they offer and may skip out on coverage entirely.

“I may be looking at one day not being able to afford health care coverage,” Vickers said. “I’ll do what I have to do when the time comes, and that may mean going without health care.”

Meanwhile, the Maryland model is undergoing a major transition this year, as state health officials and federal officials finalize new terms of the States Advancing All-Payer Health Equity Approaches and Development, or AHEAD, model.

Current negotiations appear to prompt the state to offer solutions to the stabilize Medicare Advantage. There may also be significant changes to the state’s Medicare rate-setting authority.

Shen, like other Medicare recipients, hopes something can be done so that insurers will stay in the state.

“I don’t know if the state can help, but that’s what I ask for,” he said. “They should do something.”

By Danielle J. Brown

Maryland officials unveiled a $340 million settlement Thursday and issued a new water quality certification to the Conowingo Dam, clearing the way for dam owner Constellation Energy to seek a new 50-year federal license to operate the hydroelectric facility.

The deal also resolves years of contentious litigation over the nearly century-old dam, which has become an environmental flashpoint in recent years as its overwhelmed reservoir has allowed polluting sediment to overflow into the Susquehanna River.

Particularly during severe storms, water overflowing from the Conowingo reservoir carries nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus downstream, contributing to “dead zones” for underwater life in the Chesapeake Bay and hampering a struggling multistate effort to clean up the bay.

The settlement between Maryland, Constellation and a pair of clean water advocacy groups — Waterkeepers Chesapeake and the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper — includes $87.6 million for pollution reduction measures, including planting of trees and underwater grasses. It also includes more than $60 million to improve fish passage over the dam, control invasive species and create a hatchery for freshwater mussels to be planted in the river; and another $77.8 million to clean up trash and debris rushing down the Susquehanna.

Constellation will also pay $18.7 million to explore, and possibly begin, dredging at the dam’s reservoir. But any dredging is still a long way off. All parties are waiting for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study that will use computer modeling to assess the impacts of dredging on the reservoir and river downstream. Once that study is complete, likely in late 2026 or 2027, the Maryland Department of the Environment will decide how to use dredging payments that Constellation must make annually for 25 years.

Even then, the agency could move toward getting a dredging permit, could call for more studies — including evaluating the potentially lucrative reuse of silt dredged from behind the dam — or could designate Constellation’s dredging payments to other environmental projects if the Corps study indicates dredging is inadvisable.

Robin Broder, executive director of Waterkeepers Chesapeake, said Thursday that she feels confident dredging will happen eventually.

Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Ted Evgeniadis said his team believes dredging is an economic and viable option. Prior estimates, which found that dredging would cost Constellation “hundreds of millions of dollars every year for 50 years,” are no longer accurate, he said.

“Dredging is much different today than it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. There are new technologies today, whether it’s a hydraulic dredge or an ejection dredge,” Evgeniadis said. “All of these new things that have come up over the years are going to be looked at.”

A news conference Thursday at the foot of the dam — near where fishermen cast their lines and below scores of circling vultures and waterbirds — featured what one Constellation official said would usuallyt be considered “strange bedfellows”: Maryland state officials, leaders of environmental nonprofits and Constellation Energy CEO Joseph Dominguez.

Dominguez jokingly turned his pocket inside out Thursday, telling the crowd: “Yeah, this is costly for us. And yeah, I don’t have anything but lint left in my pockets on this one.”

“But I’m glad it’s resolved. I’m glad we can get up here and proudly say we’re doing all of this work,” said Dominguez, praising Gov. Wes Moore’s “steady hand” in the negotiations over the dam, which has 11 turbines, and can produce up to 572 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 165,000 homes.

The story goes back to 2018, when Maryland issued a water quality certification to the dam’s previous owner, Exelon. Constellation and its energy generation portfolio split from Exelon in 2022 to became a standalone business.

That certification would have required the company to mitigate the nutrient and sediment overflows, or make compensatory payments to the state that Exelon said could have totaled $172 million a year. That’s because the dam contributes an estimated 6 million pounds of nitrogen and 260,000 pounds of phosphorus to the bay each year, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.

Exelon challenged Maryland’s certification in court, and eventually the two parties reached a closed-door deal in which Exelon accepted a number of environmental conditions and agreed to pay about $200 million over 5o years toward restoring the Susquehanna and easing fish passage over the dam. In turn, Maryland waived its authority to issue the water quality certification, to the ire of environmental groups.

That’s where a federal court said Maryland went wrong. In December 2022, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the 50-year hydropower  license issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission  because it said Maryland could not waive its authority to issue the certification.

That sent Maryland back to the negotiating table — now with Constellation and the two environmental groups, who had also challenged the original water quality certification as not going far enough to protect the ecosystem. This was happening just as Moore was taking office.

“We inherited a project that was mired in lawsuits, had frustrations on all sides, where the future of the largest source of renewable energy in our state was in question, while environmental impacts were being unchecked,” Moore said. “I had people who said to me — they had a lot of words — but it all could get summed up in basically a few simple sentences: Stay away from the Conowingo Dam, because that problem is just too difficult to solve.”

Moore’s new environment secretary at the time, Serena McIlwain, having just arrived from California’s Department of the Environment, had to quickly get up to speed on the Conowingo Dam, along with the state’s other environmental challenges.

“I was told that, well, everything kind of went wrong with the negotiations before we started. One was, we didn’t have the right people at the table,” McIlwain said. “And I said to my team, make sure the right people — the waterkeepers — are at the table.”

Maryland learned “hard lessons” from the court’s rejection of the previous settlement, said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown. This time, the state issued a revised version of the 2018 water quality certification, along with the settlement.

“The Department of the Environment will retain full power to enforce compliance with water quality standards — and that matters,” said Brown, who called the settlement a “historic victory” for Marylanders and the Chesapeake Bay.

Getting to the finish line was challenging. Brown said it took more than 30 mediation sessions. McIlwain said there were times when some of the parties were “ready to walk out the door.” Among the biggest sticking points was the dredging issue, said Adam Ortiz, a deputy secretary at the Maryland Department of the Environment.

“We could have given up months ago. We really could have,” McIlwain said. “But I knew I needed my job, and I said: ‘You guys are going to get back at that table, and I’ll bring more food. I don’t care. We’re going to get it done.’”

Constellation’s Dominguez bemoaned the long road the dam operator had to walk in order to get its critical new license from FERC.

“It shouldn’t have taken us 10 years to sort through all of the issues here, and that’s a bit disappointing,” he said. “But … the resolution to those permitting issues often requires people coming together who have different interests, that sometimes have conflicting interests, and bringing those folks together and making something good happen.”

By Christine Condon

In a Baltimore Sun article headlined “Seven years, $13M in tax dollars: What happened to Cambridge Harbor?” state and local officials acknowledge that the ambitious mixed-use project, which was planned to include an anchor hotel, fishing pier, shops, and residential development, is still “years away from any substantive progress.” They cite pending approvals and uncertain financing as major reasons for the delay. The Sun notes that pier funding has yet to be approved by the state, no hotel developer has been hired, and the city has not signed off on the plans.

According to the Sun’s review of tax filings and other records, Cambridge Waterfront Development Inc. (CWDI) has received $13.158 million in federal, state, and local grants over the past six years. That includes $8.8 million in state grants, $2.4 million in federal funding, $1.5 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, $204,000 directly from Cambridge, and $205,000 from Dorchester County. The records show that 27 percent went to construction, 24 percent to design, 24 percent to property acquisition, 18 percent to demolition, and 7 percent to operating costs.

CWDI chairwoman Angie Hengst said the group is working with city planning staff on required approvals and hopes to have a contract signed by the end of October.

Editor’s note: The Baltimore Sun may have a paywall for some readers.

 

At its September 18 meeting, the Dorchester County Board of Education renewed and expanded its school-based mediation program by approving a new contract to address student conflict and social challenges that have persisted since valuable “developmental time” was lost during the pandemic years.

The $75,000 contract with the Easton-based Mid-Shore Community Mediation Center will help the school system’s mediation efforts begin to move from a reactive tool to something more embedded in school life, Mediation Center Executive Director Justin Acome said during his September 18 presentation to the Board of Education. 

Acome told the board that mediation is no longer just a tool for responding to fights but is beginning to function as part of everyday school culture. He said the approach is helping students rebuild relationships and learn how to resolve conflicts constructively, not simply avoid them.

He noted that the mediation process remains voluntary and confidential, which limits how broadly it can be applied. Still, he pointed out that the program has helped change the climate in participating schools. 

Many students continue to struggle with what he called a “socialization deficit” since COVID-19, when necessary developmental time was lost, Acome added. In his view, mediation offers a structured way for students to recognize the value of relationships and learn conflict resolution skills in a supportive setting.

The new contract will build on the existing mediation that has begun to “find its footing.”  More than just stepping in after a student conflict, it’s about getting into the space early and helping students rebuild relationships, and “not just avoiding conflict” but learning how to resolve them.

Acome acknowledged that mediation remains a voluntary and confidential process, which can limit opportunities to reach students before problems escalate. Still, he said the work has made a difference in school climate. 

Under the plan for the coming year, services will be concentrated at Mace’s Lane Middle School, while continuing to support Cambridge-South Dorchester and North Dorchester high schools, and the Dorchester Career and Technology Center.  Mediators will provide one-on-one sessions, student workshops, and maintain a more substantial on-site presence, aiming to intervene earlier and more consistently, he said.

While Acome praised the progress so far, he also said there is much work ahead, with regard to measuring results, expanding reach, and ensuring mediators maintain a consistent presence in county schools. 

 

Recently, WHCP’s Jim Brady and The Cambridge Spy’s P. Ryan Anthony had their regular check-in with Dr. Jymil Thompson, superintendent of Dorchester County Public Schools. The focus was on DCPS’s move up in the rankings of Maryland school systems, after being in 23rd place in the state.

Dr. Thompson explained what DCPS did to raise their ranking, including the staff’s change of mindset from concentrating on discipline problems to a focus on academics. He talked about where there are still weaknesses and what opportunities they can harness.

Significantly, Thompson mentioned that the students need a solid foundation from the earliest grades so they can succeed later on. As for his expectations for the future, he has every intention of DCPS being ranked 15th in three years.

This video is approximately nine minutes long.