AUGUSTA -- For Rhona Wade of Wayne, a widow who provides live-in care for her physically and mentally disabled sister, Medicaid is a godsend that almost fully pays for six medications she takes daily for problems ranging from a heart condition to high blood pressure.

Her out-of-pocket cost was $285 last year, thanks to a $3 co-pay. Without insurance, Wade said recently, she would have to pay more than $7,800 a year for prescriptions.

A former secretary who signed up for Medicaid after cancer claimed her husband's life a few years ago, Wade has a monthly income that barely exceeds $600, from a life insurance annuity and her late husband's military pension.

And she could soon lose her drug coverage.

The latest round of budget cuts that Gov. John Baldacci proposed Wednesday would eliminate prescription coverage for thousands of Medicaid recipients like Wade: adults with incomes up to 100 percent of the federal poverty level who have no children living at home.

That would trim almost $7 million from the state's general-fund budget, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

"I think they should be able to cut different things" and safeguard prescription coverage for those who need it, said Wade, the 56-year-old mother of two grown daughters. "It seems that, when a town or a state wants to cut, they want to cut what's necessary rather than what isn't."

Her alternatives? Crack down on Medicaid recipients who abuse the system by racing to the hospital at the first sign of a sniffle, and trim the number of overpaid "higher-ups" in the state bureaucracy.

With annual income of less than $8,000, Wade is known in Medicaid jargon as a "non-categorical." Those are poor, childless adults who don't fit into any of the standard Medicaid categories, such as parents raising children.

"Non-cats," in State House shorthand, earn no more than $10,404 a year individually or $14,004 in a two-person household, according to the DHHS.

More than 18,000 of Maine's 267,000 Medicaid recipients are "non-cats," a number that Baldacci hopes to cut to 12,000 by the end of the next fiscal year, through attrition.

Funded by the state and federal governments, Medicaid provides services in Maine that are required by federal law, as well as some that are not.

Maine has chosen to provide prescription coverage for people like Wade. But it's a choice that Baldacci wants to reverse as he tries to offset a $190 million shortfall in the state's $6.3 billion, two-year budget without raising taxes or dipping into the state's savings accounts.

The cuts that Baldacci submitted to the Legislature last week followed a round that he sent to lawmakers in January, before state experts concluded that what looked like a $95 million budget shortfall actually is twice that size.

The latest cuts, which Baldacci has described as painful, extend across state government and include reductions in state aid to schools, as well as funding cuts for the University of Maine System, the Maine Community College System and Maine Maritime Academy.

The Legislature's Appropriations Committee, which has completed public hearings on the initial cuts, will hold hearings Tuesday and Wednesday on the latest plan. The committee will then craft a budget of its own for the full Legislature to consider.

In addition to making the prescription cut for some Medicaid recipients, the new plan would force a separate group of about 5,600 Medicaid recipients to pay an annual $25 enrollment fee.

Advocates for the poor do not like either idea. But dropping prescription coverage for people like Wade is the more controversial of the two.

The prescription cut would apply to what Sara GagnŽ Holmes of Maine Equal Justice Partners, an advocacy group, calls "the poorest of the poor," people who are even poorer than those who would pay the enrollment fee.

Baldacci embraced cutting drug coverage as the lesser of two evils. His choice was to scale back Medicaid benefits for all 18,000 childless adults in the program or kick about 3,500 of them off the Medicaid rolls entirely, said David Farmer, Baldacci's spokesman.

"The governor felt it was more important to keep basic coverage" for all of them, Farmer said. Ideally, Baldacci would like to find other ways to help the affected people, or restore the prescription benefit when and if the state can afford it.

Lawmakers are divided on the merits of the plan. The split falls largely along party lines.

Childless adults on Medicaid are especially poor, and some of them are homeless or mentally ill, or have a history of drug or alcohol abuse, said House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, D-North Haven.

Depriving that group of prescription benefits would poke holes in "the core safety net" for social services, Pingree said.

Senate Minority Leader Carol Weston, R-Montville, counters that the safety net is supposed to protect the elderly, the disabled and children, so childless adults are not part of that population.

She said it would be better to remove childless adults from the Medicaid rolls, not just drop their prescription coverage, if doing so would free up enough money to fully protect threatened services for other groups.

As for Wade, who lives with her sister in the home that their father built 50 years ago, she doesn't know what she would do if she lost prescription coverage, because she could not afford her medication without getting a job.

That would require her to find a new home, or a full-time caregiver, for her 57-year-old sister, Mary Pettengill.

Wade said her sister has cerebral palsy and cannot walk or stand on her own. She has choking episodes and mild but periodic seizures, and is no longer able to attend day-care programs, as she did until quite recently.

"Basically, she's a child," Wade said of her sister. "She wouldn't survive in a nursing home," because she's so family-oriented.

"I'd have to get somebody who was really qualified" to care for her, Wade said. "I'd have to get somebody she would trust."

Even if such a person could be found, she said, "I don't know if I'd be able to afford that."