Maine Regulation Digest / How this is made

How this digest is made

Every night, software reads four MaineCare publication channels, records what changed, and refuses to record anything it cannot quote from the source. The tables on these pages are published automatically. The paragraphs of analysis are drafted by software and are not published until I have read and edited them.

Where the facts come from

• The MaineCare Benefits Manual, as published by the Maine Secretary of State the rule text itself
• MaineCare provider bulletins rate letters, corrections, announcements
• The DHHS rulemaking page proposed and adopted rules
• The published fee schedules reference rates, by procedure code

What "confirmed" means here

A detected change is recorded only when its quoted words appear character for character in the document it was found in. That check runs before anything is stored, so a change nobody can quote is a change this digest does not carry. A second pass then argues against each detection — reading the same document and trying to disprove the claim — and only what survives that argument reaches these pages.

It follows that this digest is incomplete on purpose. A change MaineCare published in a form the software could not read is a change you will not find here, and the section pages say when the sources were last read so you can tell the difference between "nothing changed" and "nothing was looked at".

What is automated and what is not

The change tables, the was-and-now values, the effective dates, the citations and the feed are generated straight from what was detected, and they update without me. The analysis on a change's own page is drafted by a language model from the same quoted material, and then edited by a person before it is published. Where a page carries the line "Reviewed by Mike Preble", somebody read it on that date. Where it does not, nothing on the page is prose.

Who writes this

Mike Preble, founder of Hornbeam Health, in the Bangor area, Maine. Hornbeam builds compliance and MaineCare software for independently-owned Maine behavioral health agencies, which is why this digest exists: the same monitoring that tells our customers a rate moved can tell everybody else.

When a page is wrong

Write to us and it gets fixed, and the correction is visible in the page's history. MaineCare itself issues corrections — a corrected bulletin appears here as its own change rather than as a silent edit to the old one, because an agency that acted on the first version needs to see that it moved.