Governor Granholm has proposed cutting $40 million from non Medicaid community mental health programs.
The Senate passed a 2009-10 budget that cut $61.8 million from that budget--$21 million more than the Governor proposed.
The state is trying to cut $1.8 billion from the 09-10 budget that must be finalized before October 1st when the new sate fiscal year begins. Some believe the deficit will grow to over $2 billion before the budget gets finalized.
This year the state will spend $332 million to fund the 46 community mental health srvice providers that deliver treatment. in 2008 more than 230,00 Michigan citizens were helped through these programs.
Many are concerned that as unemployment soars (over 15%) more mental health needs will be confronted by local communities and people may leave people with unmet mental health needs.
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This is incredibly bad news. Our mental health system is already not working very well, and this will only increase the problem. What in-patient units are available (there are only two in the UP) are full and not very well funded. Outpatient support is minimal and again already poorly funded. Currently mental health patients are mostly on their own, with little or no support for their families. These people often end up on the street, or in the emergency departments. If anything in times of economic turmoil there needs to be more support for this illness.
ReplyDeleteHow about pay cuts for the state legislature? With unemployment at such a high rate, the incidence of people diagnosed with a mental illness has risen also. If taken to the extreme, individuals who are unable to receive proper treatment for that illness could potentially take out their frustrations on society or themselves. In other words, crime rates (murder, suicide, rape, theft, vandalism, etc.) will increase as well which will still cost the state money because the people committing these crimes will then have to be housed in our already crowded prisons and jails (whose budgets have also been cut).
ReplyDeleteHigh rates of unemployment will lead to higher incidence of mental illness. Left untreated, it could not only lead to homelessness or crowding of hospitals and clinics but a rise in crime rates as well. Any way you look at it, cutting the budget for community mental health programs just pushes the problem to other programs albeit in some other way. It also ensures that the budgets for those other programs will prove to be insufficient as they are pushed to the limit.