Action: MH/DD Services To Be Decimated, and There Is No Safety Net
Submitted by Gordon Smith on Tue, 06/02/2009 - 9:57am
{c/p @ Scrutiny Hooligans}
The NC House budget proposes a 40% cut in mental health services including the dissolution of Community Support Services, a vital tool to maintain people in their communities rather than relying on emergency rooms, hospitals, and jails. If you make three calls today, you can help our legislators understand that cutting education and mental health services will have extraordinary costs to future generations. The ARC of North Carolina sent this Action Alert:
Our service system will be set back 40 years. The House’s proposed budget cuts to Health and Human Services and Medicaid will have a total impact of close to $3.5 billion.
The entire service system will be destroyed. Individuals and families will lose their services. It’s not even a matter of trying to send people with [mental illness and] developmental disabilities back to institutions - there won’t be institutions and there won’t be community supports.
A few of the worst cuts are:
- Reducing the budget for state-funded services by over $150,000,000
- Cuts all Medicaid service rates by 4% causing salary reductions and layoffs
- Cuts Medicaid Personal Care Services by over $50,000,000…reducing the services by over half. This is the only direct service other than case management that is a Medicaid entitlement for people with developmental disabilities
- Eliminates continuation increases in Medicaid of over $500,000,000. This cut means serious reductions because any increases in CAP plans implemented during the last fiscal year will be eliminated
- Cuts case management services by over $50,000,000 by “consolidation”
- Eliminates the Medicaid service called Community Support which is the one Medicaid service that is designed to support people with mental illness in the community.
THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW! We must all unite to fight the House’s proposed budget, and we have no time to waste. The House may vote on the budget as early as June 8.
No one can afford to sit back and watch this budget debacle play out. The lives of people with disabilities, their families and the entire state of North Carolina depend on everyone getting involved. Don’t think someone else will make the calls. YOU must make the calls!
The Arc of NC has a strategic advocacy plan. Today, tomorrow and Wednesday the leadership of the House must hear from you. We will send out an e-alert when it is time for the next steps, but today, you need to make three calls:
- Speaker Hackney 919-733-3451
- Majority Leader Holliman 919-715-0873
- Minority Leader Stam 919-733-2962
These representatives must receive thousands of phone calls in the next two days.
To follow The Arc of North Carolina’s activities on the House budget, read our blog at: www.thearcnc.blogspot.com.
We’ve got a tough fight ahead of us, but we can make a difference if we all work together to defeat the House’s proposed budget.
Dave Richard
Executive Director
The Arc of North Carolina
Please make these three calls right now. It will take you five minutes, and you’ll be letting the House leadership know that shortsighted policy will not be tolerated by the people of North Carolina.
-- Edited to fix URLs and formatting. [DB]
in washington state...
...it costs about $11,000 a month to provide services for dd clients in an institutional environment.
it will cost at least that much to maintain clients with mental health issues as inmates in the corrections system.
as you note, it will cost more to serve clients at emergency rooms...or, even worse, first by paramedics or police (or both) and then at the er.
to me, this looks less like cost cutting, and more like cost reshuffling--and ineffective cost reshuffling, to boot.
"...i feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." --tom lehrer, january 1965