Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed
tampabay.com
tampabay.com
The underlying reason for cuts in Mental Health is the same reason 1,000 State jobs got eliminated this year or $1.2B was cut from FL education the Governor's first year...it is a finite budget problem.
Take the Zika virus, a current South Florida news story gaining national attention. I haven't seen a single news spot/article mention how Zika is linked to the budget cuts (State and local) that gutted mosquito controlling programs. There is no mention how before Zika, in 2009 under former Governor Crist the budget cuts for mosquito control lead to a Dengue outbreak (~4,000 cases). Yet about $5.5M in mosquito control cuts lead to a $5.5B (10%) loss in FL tourism in 2009, these are not calculated political decision of the Right, but difficult budget decision that had horrendous consequences.
To really put it in perspective, Crist later ran for Senate as an Independent and then re-ran for Governor as a Democrat with full support of Obama...party affiliation would not have changed the decisions he made as a Republican Governor. Further take the $1.2B education cut the first year of the new Governor, since then he has fully restored that amount and then some, why? Not because as a member of the Right he changed his political ideology towards education, but the reality is FL is $200B in debt; however, we are no longer running a $3.5B deficit, in fact not only is the budget balanced this year FL is projected to have a surplus and that has allowed the Governor to restore education funding.
Sometimes you need to spend money to protect against a future where the costs are even higher. The mosquito control initiative could have paid for itself with the sales taxes on that $5.5B in revenue that never happened.
Either that or start working deals with other states to deal with the inevitable exodus of people and the complete implosion of the tax base.
Remember, a lot of these states that are suffering from tax revenue problems have some of the lowest tax rates in the country. Where are people going to flee to? The 49th lowest tax state instead of the 48th?
Had the republican (turned independent, turned democrat) governor Crist known saving $5.5M would cost $5.5B he wouldn't have done it, but he didn't and instead maybe he saved 100 state jobs.
It's easy to know the right decision after the facts, but these budget issues cut both ways. For example, during the housing crisis to keep Florida operating I believe Crist liquidated like 1/3 to 2/3 of FL pension trusts. So, yes it's great that FL didn't shut down, but what happens when FL can't pay retirees pensions?
So if you want $100M for mental Health funding who do you take it from?
I don't expect people to be psychic, but common sense must apply here. When you "save money" by slashing budgets on road repairs, and ten years later your roads are so awful you have to replace them all at great expense, is that really savings?
A bridge that's deteriorating is expensive to fix. A bridge that's collapsed from lack of maintenance is crazy expensive to replace.
The so-called fiscal conservatives are always looking at saving money now, they don't seem to care about what happens tomorrow.
Well FL already has programs in place releasing felons to free up funds, so whats a few more felons...although talking about looking at saving money now vs not seeming to care about what happens tomorrow, about 10% of those released early will commit new crimes during the period they should have still been incarcerated.
>The so-called fiscal conservatives are always looking at saving money now, they don't seem to care about what happens tomorrow.
Perhaps they are cutting their nose off despite their face as you suggest due to some warped politically ideology, but they say the same thing about the other side. Looking at the most fiscally healthy states, they are all red states. In fact what makes the most fiscally unhealthy states what they are is not that they are blue, but that they are taking on obligations (usually pension and healthcare) today that will make them insolvent tomorrow. I am aware the common response is sure they don't have the money to pay the obligations but the revenue will come in the future, but history shows that debt simply continues to climb resulting in more and more tough budget cuts...until bankruptcy and while we haven't had one at the State level yet, there are 51 municipalities/cities who have filed (both red and blue, but by far the largest bankruptcies were blue).
Still I maintain it does no good looking at these things as left/right, because they are budget decisions and both ideologies fail and both succeed fiscally. Unfortunately politics gets people taking a side and acting irrationally when confronting facts, say for example how fiscal conservatives hammer Obama for doubling the debt and yet they praise Reagan (who tripled the debt). Or when you get Trump saying Obama is soft on immigration when there have been more deportations during his administration than any other.
The worst is those who are otherwise good citizens but got busted for simple possession and are doing years of time. That costs the state hundreds of thousands of dollars, and after they're branded a felon, they'll probably "re-offend" given they have limited job opportunities.
If you wanted to design a system to generate prisoners they're doing a great job, which given the for-profit prison system, is probably the idea.
The mosquito thing in particular, you could totally say "Year N's costs will get covered in year N+2's sales taxes"
This is, of course, assuming that revenue increases. But all else being equal, inflation makes this happen
not true. Like every action of a politician this one was political too. You can cut 5.5M of mosquito control or, for example, you can release couple hundreds of low level drug offenders or similar. The latter would cost him political career, so he went with the former (which condemned 4000 people to getting the disease).
Then I realized it's because they couldn't make mental health patients do slave labor, and why leave all that money on the table when the facilities they'd be building are basically the same, as are the people they'll be housing, once they and their political allies have successfully choked out the public mental health system. Ah the glory of the free market.
Blind worship of a free market can lead to some pretty obscene outcomes.
Yeah, it should be public like Canada, where I've been on a waiting list for 2 years just to get a family doctor...
I think there's some middle ground there. The market does solve certain problems.
Perhaps the benefits are clearer if you have ongoing medical issues? Or perhaps my old family doctor wasn't doing things a family doctor is supposed to do in terms of ongoing care?
There can be waiting lists for public surgeons however, and private health insurance can help solve that to an extent.
I think we have a good balance here but I am not familiar enough with the nuances of health care to know.
The wait times are sometimes an issue that needs improvement, but overall the quality of care one has access to is greatly improved. I'll no longer have to be faced with putting off surgery because I can't afford the co-payment, nor afraid of being injured and not affording physical therapy. And this is with insurance.
Here there are ways to get things quicker if the situation is urgent, but there it really was dependent on money. The yearly payments top out at an amount that is less than the deductible I had in the states... and my insurance wasn't bad there. I'll take the universal care and wait times any day.
There are lots of people in prison who would be better off in mental hospitals but you need to be committed to go to a mental hospital. They're not nice places. Few people are going to voluntarily commit themselves, and that's before considering that (a) They check if you're doing something suicidal every 15 minutes so you get neither sleep nor privacy (b) Lots of psychiatric drugs are hideous. The side effect profiles of anti-psychotics are such that being schizophrenic can look fine.
As to the patients/inmates and facilities you're wrong. A mental hospital looks like a hospital, not a prison, inside and out. They'll have better security than a normal hospital but the comparison is absurd if you've visited both, or even just seen both on tv. And the inmates at a penal institution are enormously more violent that the patients at mental hospitals.
The ironic thing about "anti-psychotics" is that they worsen the conditions they supposedly treat. [1]
[1] "Drug-induced supersensitivity psychosis revisited: characteristics of relapse in treatment-compliant patients" - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3736929/
People (especially tea-baggers, like Rick Scott) seem to like hurting others more then helping others, all things being equal. All things being unequal, they prefer to profit off of others!
It's too bad that the people who founded the country didn't lay down some sort of law against a (then colonial) government sabotaging itself. We even have a vestigial British governor general who could enforce it for us. The word "treason" comes to mind.
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-men...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-...
And, of course, police departments all over the country have been sending their homeless and mentally ill to CA and Berkeley for decades, as well.
Seems that we have some horrible drugs on our streets these days so rinse and repeat. Happy days.
If you need to do things off the books one of the best ways to do that is through illegal operations, something made easier when you can do these things with almost zero legal ramifications.
Just like every other political issue, mental health, is complicated and there isn't one reason or person for the way things are.
Blaming Reagan ignores the dact that new antipsychotics were developed that allowed patients that were previous confinded to institutions to be released to the community.
Also, the ACLU along with the supreme court changed the laws and made it much tougher to confine people for mental health issues. One of the biggest challenges in treating mental health is compliance. Having a mental illness often takes away the ability to see what's best for yourself. Ask a mental patient if they want to go to the hospital, they'll often say no. And based on current laws, there isn't anything we can do about it.
What specifically do you disagree with in the linked timeline?
> mental health, is complicated and there isn't one reason or person for the way things are... Blaming Reagan ignores the dact that new antipsychotics were developed that allowed patients that were previous confinded to institutions to be released to the community.
The linked timeline mentions these and doesn't "blame Reagan for everything". However the current context of this discussion is slashed budgets for mental health inpatient care and comparisons to the Reagan administration are both obvious and relevant.
Mother Jones is of course a politically progressive magazine, so there's a bias in the topics they cover. But that sort of bias says nothing about the quality of the coverage. The Economist is also 'incredibly biased' in what it cover, and they do good job of it as well.
Similarly, Mother Jones wins awards, like the National Magazine Awards.
Quoting its co-editor Clara Jeffery http://www.wnyc.org/story/what-its-when-redditors-ban-your-w... :
> We report from all side of an issue. We do investigations into things that people on the left or the Democrats wish we wouldn’t. And all of our journalism is fact-checked, sourced, and linked through. Facts are what we do, and statistical data analysis journalism is a big part of what we do. So I don’t see that part either. And we don’t really lace our reporting with opinion. It’s more, we’re a shop that cares about the little guy and inequality. So that informs some, but by no means all, of our story selection.
You have TONS of more reputable news sources to choose from like the Atlantic, New Yorker, NYT, Economist, etc. With MJ you're just reading straight-up propaganda and it's very distasteful.
In the case of mental health, a lot of things would have to happen before we could get those mentally ill people off the streets. And Mother Jones would oppose many of those things. For example, we would have to be able to commit more people to institutions against their will. We would have to make it harder to sue mental health professionals or else the government would be bankrupted. To really get a lot of them back to work, we'd have to lower the minimum wage to the point that businesses were actually willing to pay for their time rather than use a robot or an outsourced Indian. But that's a lot more complex than hurr hurr Regan was teh Satan, so you won't find that discussed by MJ.
I can't tell from that if you mean that the Democratic party is an extremist party, or if you mean that that Fox News is as moderate towards the right as the Democrats are towards the left, or both.
I thought 'Democracy Now' was more like the left-extreme version of right-extreme Fox News, only much less influential. In any cases, shouldn't your comparison be more to one of the conservative print sources? Is Mother Jones more like the National Review or The American Conservative for the left?
From what you wrote, it's hard for me to tell if your statement that the Mother Jones writing "gives you a distorted picture" is because you also have a distorted partisan view.
About the only times I read an article from Mother Jones is when it was submitted here on HN, which occurs a few times each week according to an HN search.
I looked now at several of their investigation pieces, at http://www.motherjones.com/topics/investigations?page=1 , I do not get the same feeling of being "less informed" that you described. To the contrary, pieces like "They Had Created This Remarkable System for Taking Every Last Dime From Their Customers" and "The World Bank Is Supposed to Help the Poor. So Why Is it Bankrolling Oligarchs?" seem like informative, well-written pieces that I would expect from those reputable sources you mentioned. They also link to primary resources, including SEC filings and court documents. That's not something I see from Fox News reports.
The web site lists only a small number of investigations, I can't find an investigation that the Democrats wish hadn't been reported. I instead looked for other long-form pieces.
Five years ago they ran "Why the Democratic Party Has Abandoned the Middle Class in Favor of the Rich", http://www.alternet.org/story/151108/why_the_democratic_part... (first appeared in Mother Jones, but doesn't appear to be online) and "Why Screwing Unions Screws the Entire Middle Class" at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequalit... , which contains among other things the line "The Democratic Party has largely abandoned the working class".
The author of those piece is Keven Drum, who has continued with more recent articles like "Democrats Have Done Virtually Nothing for the Middle Class in 30 Years".
These do not appear to be something the Democratic Party would wish published.
My examination is only cursory, so while I don't see how you reached your conclusion, you have the longer experience with Mother Jones to be a better judge.
Basically, I don't consider either publication a useful source of news. In general, both of them leave out the context that would be needed to understand what is going on in the world. For example, that Mother Jones article about "Why is [the world bank] Bankrolling Oligarchs" leaves out the context of what has been going on in Myanmar in the last few years. Myanmar has gone from being a completely military-run state, to allowing a limited democratic opposition to exist. The World Bank is making investments there partly as a kind of reward for that. If the World Bank left, other countries like China would step in and try to buy influence there with their own equivalent of the IMF (China Development Bank). It invests in bigger companies because it has to, because the managerial overhead of investing in tiny ones would be way too high.
All the same issues exist in our government's aid programs to poor countries. The money does indeed often get siphoned off to the rich and well-connected. But of course Mother Jones doesn't comment on this, becuase the narrative is government = good, World Bank = bad. If facts or context have to be left out to fit the narrative, they always will.
I could go on, but you get the idea. By leaving out facts and, most especially, context, biased news sources like these leave you less informed after you read them than before.
Is Florida going to add more police, social workers, ER doctors and etc deal with the consequences?
This is GOP 101.
Never elect a Republican governor. See MI, ME, FL, etc, etc.
The Community Mental Health act was fully funded at the time it was passed, to the tune of $330 million, and received almost $2 billion over the next decade. It was an example of an INCREASE in federal funding for mental health, put forth by Democrats, and bitterly opposed by Republicans.
Individual states, with Republican blessing, were the culprits in not continuing to fund local clinics. Then in 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan changed federal mental health funding to make it a block grant, spendable by states any old way they chose. And many chose NOT to spend it on mental health. Not content to turn Californians with mental illness out in the street (which he did as California governor), he decided he'd do that to America at large.
Don't try to blame Dems for standard Republican obstructionism that damaged and continues to damage public health.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act
First, defunding and not funding are two different things.
Second, congress has to fund it, not the POTUS.
Third, you're one of those "they're both the same" but they're not both the same.
Followed by the end of it: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-declines-to-appeal-furth...
People with mental issues don't make political donations, rarely vote, and can't defend themselves. QED.
[1] We can argue about which was really the the last defensive war fought by the US, but by any reasonable measure it is at least almost gone from living memory.
states don't spend any money on defense
sounds like you had something to say, but got lost along the way
Or perhaps you are choosing to interpret my words in a way that leads to a silly result.
The much more obvious reading starts with noting that the party ruling Florida is the same party that also happens to have policy positions that are of a piece at the local, state and national level positions.
- If you're playing that game where overstating things for political effect because you [...], have fun, but I don't want to play.
- If you actually believe that, either your priorities are so very far removed from mine that we have nothing to say to each other, or you have blinded yourself to a huge array of very real differences with very real effects on very real people. In which case, find someone else to argue with; I prefer to debate politics with people who live in the real world.
no. Like all the others it will add more prisons. Prison guards unions and commercial prison providers are doing exceptionally well financially and the prison guard unions are actually the biggest and most powerful lobbyists, at least in CA.
There is no such thing as decrease of spending, there are only increase and redistribution - benefiting the most powerful of course.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...
Edit: I can't find any primary sources regarding lobbying by the CCPOA, but I did find a blog on a site called Union Watch that makes the claim about CCPOA being the largest lobbyist, and then I saw that quotes in Reason, and the a lot of people quoting Reason. So, right-wing echo chamber in action as far as I can tell.
And when it come to right/left wing - while both are unions, teachers union and prison guard union are on the opposite sides, so pigeon-hole accordingly.
it isn't exactly full order, so you kind of right in questioning my statements at their absolute face value. It is more like partial order here - oil industry and the guards have orthogonal interests. Except for the one aspect - guards consume state budget while oil industry is a source of it. And as we know from the business community whining - CA is considered "not business friendly"/"high tax state". Though of course i don't think the guards and oil clash directly here - the guards' politics is more about redistribution of the budget away from the other categories. I.e the oil and the guards have their own big fields to play, and when it comes to their own fields, the guards have much higher success than oil in their respective fields in CA.
And, man, $22 millions is just a rounding error for either of the players - the CA prison budget is $10B.
If you remember the beginning of Schwarzenegger's time, the first thing he did was taking on the biggest problem of the state - the guards union. He failed. No surprise here given the nature of the task. Still my personal great respect to him - he was the only one who even have ever tried to do it.
Brown has actually reduced the prison population, notably by reforming sentencing laws and reclassifying many crimes as misdemeanors. The California prison population now stands at a level lower than in 1996, and a per-capita level lower than in 1992.
No matter how much city/states spend, they can't fill up the hospitals and treat patients, which is why most of the hospitals were closed.
If you are interested, there's a very thorough book on the subject that I'd recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/My-Brother-Ron-Personal-Deinstitution...
"Since 1909, Florida has had a proud tradition that all government business is public business and therefore should be available to the public. That means all records, including photos and videos, produced by a public agency are easily accessible with a few narrow and obvious exceptions. Public officials are also required to open all of their meetings — even unofficial ones — to the public."
[1] http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/how-floridas-proud-open-go...
Check out the West Oakland BART stop for a good example. There is an ambulance there nearly every day for several hours dealing with the same mentally ill addicted woman. Imagine what it costs to tie up a couple cop cars, an ambulance, and a full ambulance crew. Plus the ER services.
Now compare that to the cost of dealing properly with one mentally ill person.
Cutting mental health services doesn't save us money; it magnifies both the root problem, and the costs.
Of course there is a whole point of whether government ought to spend some money now to avoid spending on basic services later whether there are proper studies done and if people agree to it and if the mental hospitals are free for everyone. But that was not my question here.
Based on...?
To throw out another number for comparison, medicare and medicaid together cost about $50B / year in the state.
The Tampa Bay investigation's violence refers to violence in the hospitals itself and not the general violence in society. For 13.5K per year you might reduce the hospital staff by 10% but that is unlikely to result into chaos that the report seems to suggest.
By the way, for comparison, Medicare spends $10k/year per beneficiary in Florida.
Your math only works if mentally ill people receive no other services from the state whatsoever. Assuming the mental hospitals receive supplies by road, this is not true.
To put this in perspective, Florida spent over $2.2B on its corrections system in 2014 [2].
[1] http://www.fpi.institute/floridas-provision-of-mental-health...
No.
Fucking.
Way.
How could anyone have seen this coming!?