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Say NO NO NO to Wal-Mart!!!
In article ,
says...
jps wrote:
From a recent ABC news report:
This group bulged in size, largely due to a deliberate process of
"deinstitutionalization" first begun in the 1950s. A patient's best
interest, mental health experts then agreed, was served not so much by
long-term residential care, as by community outpatient treatment. As a
result, the number of resident mental health patients in the U.S.
dropped from 559,000 in 1955 to only 54,000 in 2000, Manderscheid
reports.
But the community outpatient care system that mental health providers
had hoped to build failed to blossom. A federal grant helped construct
about 750 new community health centers between 1963 and 1978; but when
the Reagan administration converted remaining funding into block grants
to states, most opted to finance currently existing mental health
centers, rather than build new ones. According to Manderscheid, the
envisioned community mental health system "froze at that point in time."
The psychiatric ER stepped in to fill the gap in community mental health
care. Variously described as a place patients choose over prison or a
homeless shelter, or where social service agencies "dump" their toughest
cases, the psychiatric ER can play a recurring role in a patient's
behavioral pattern or disease cycle and is often the last line of
defense for repeat patients known as "frequent fliers."
As deinstitutionalization continued, releasing many of the mentally ill
to their hometowns, large numbers discovered they lacked families and
communities willing or able to care for them. Now homeless, unemployed
and uninsured, any health crisis brought them to the steps of the ER =3F
the one place that cannot turn them away.
According to logic, you should blame the states for diverting the money,
not Reagan for making the funds available in a different format.
Nitwit.
LZ
Certainly, the states bear some responsibility but I don't think our
national mental health policy should be administered at the state level.
Further, it's a long known strategy to decentralized in order to weaken.
The Reagan and the present Bush Administration know the easiest way to
eviscerate a program is to hand the money to the states. They're all in
terrible shape and would divert the money in a moment's notice to those
with a louder voice.
That's why I blame the Reagan Admin. It was a cynical "improvement" to
a system they were interested in dismantling.
Like Nancy's reversal on stem cell research, I'm sure she'd argue on the
other side of that decision now...
jps
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