Rollback To Hell
by digby
All over TV today, I’m hearing the gasbags fret about the fact that Obama hasn’t brought up gun control. It’s a good question, but they know the answer to it very well: the Democrats have given up that issue, the only problem is that the Republicans refuse to accept their surrender. They have nothing more to say about it.
I’m more curious about why they aren’t all over this:
Gov. Jan Brewer’s plan to roll back state Medicaid coverage would leave thousands of Arizona’s most mentally fragile without health care. An estimated 5,200 people diagnosed with a serious mental illness and thousands more who qualify for other behavioral-health services would be among 280,000 childless adults losing health-care coverage under the governor’s plan. To mitigate the hit on the seriously mentally ill, Brewer wants to spend $10.3 million to prevent gaps in their psychiatric medication. They would lose coverage for all other medical care, including prescription drugs for physical ailments, as well as case management, transportation and housing they receive through the state’s behavioral-health-care program. Mental-health advocates say losing case management and other connections to the community, along with their general health-care coverage, would be a devastating blow to an already vulnerable population. And it will put a greater burden on hospitals and the criminal-justice system. “The reality is cutting services does not cut demand,” said Ted Williams, CEO of the Arizona Foundation for Behavioral Health and a former state health director. “Individuals who can no longer get services through the state will wind up getting services through emergency departments . . . or they’ll get those services through the Maricopa County jail.”
Uhm. Yeah.
The state of America’s mental health services is horrific as it is. Mentally ill people aren’t likely to be well cared for in a system that requires you to be working for a big company to get decent insurance. Any cutbacks at all will exacerbate the problem. Of course, it’s hard to see how it could get worse than what happened in Tucson, so maybe they figured they’ve already been to the heart of darkness and it’s all uphill from there.
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