Lack of low-income mental health facilities/treatment is progressives' fault? SINCE WHEN?

[Doremus]

So says historical revisionist Phillip Morris, columnist for the Plain Dealer:

Today, Greater Cleveland mourns the loss of Jason West, a devoted public servant who was senselessly killed while performing his job. In the meantime, the courts prepare a capital case against a man who received one break after another from police because he was believed to be insane.

The real insanity, however, is Ohio law. Weak law governs the weakest of minds. We closed our asylums and turned those with broken brains out into the streets and told them they have civil rights, too. We clapped ourselves on our progressive backs and order them to be civil.

It fell to police, like the humanitarians on the South Euclid force, to deal with them when they stopped taking their medicine and stirred up trouble.

Halton's troublemaking is likely over, for good, but the mentally ill are legion in Cleveland. And mothers, like Tiggs, have nowhere to turn for help.

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/phillip_morris/index.ssf?/base/opinion/118060027855150.xml&coll=2&thispage=3

The death of the police officer is a tragedy, but to blame progressives for the lack of access to treatment blows green snots. Apparently Mr. Morris slept through those fine Raygun years. :eyes:

I'm soooo sick and tired of sellout gasbags spewing neocon propaganda, most especially here in deep blue Cuyahoga County.

[commander bunnypants]

1. Dang

its my fault? I am one of those idjits working in low income MH clinics for ten years now. And the money keeps drying up, drying up and drying up.

Criminal assualt is part of my job description


CB

But hey the right to keep and bear arms is alive and well!!

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. Reagan wasn't progressive

:evilgrin:

[MADem]

3. Before Ronnie, I never stepped over a half dozen sleeping homeless

people, unmedicated, urine soaked, and smelly, to get on a bus.


Yeah, blame the lefties...

Jesus, that's taking the cake, there. You might want to email that asswipe a little "edjumacation" as GeorgieBoy might say...

I sent the guy an email and asked him how old he was, and if he remembered what really happened with Reagan, or was he being "deliberately obtuse" for political reasons. I was civil, but I called him out.

Maybe a few others might want to do the same: [e-mail]

[Doremus]

4. Thanks, MADem, I already did.

Here it is:

Nice try, Mr. Morris. Bad-rapping progressives for the dearth of low income health care might actually work, assuming your readers 1) are naive 20-somethings, 2) slept through the Reagan presidency or 3) are mindless members of the 29% club (not very likely here in blue Cuyahoga County).

The majority of us recognize your words for what they are: a lame attempt to paint Democrats with the putrid stench of YOUR party's "compassionate conservatism." To set the record, and your historical revisionism, right, it was Ronald Reagan who closed all the "asylums" and turned all the "broken brains" into the streets.

There's another party plank you forgot about -- accepting responsibility for one's acts. It's high time you and your fellow Republicans started doing it.

[Cleita]

5. Here's the truth.

Back in the late seventies the Jarvis Ammendent, proposition 13, was passed in California. Howard Jarvis was a Republican with a Republican agenda that started back when Reagan was governer, but he couldn't get his initiative passed until Jerry Brown was governor. This ammendment rolled back property taxes to 1% which cut out funding for a variety of programs including mental health facilities for those too dysfunctional to be able to cope in society.

Jerry Brown had a budget surplus he was able to use to keep those programs afloat for a short while, but eventually the mental health facilities were emptied and the patients found themselves out in the streets as the homeless. This started a domino effect and soon other state governments were following suit. So today we have institutionalized homelessness and mentally dysfunctional people in our midst without care or the medications they need.

A quick google will bring up sources of this with the key words, Jarvis Ammendment, Reagan, Proposition 13 etc.. I used to have them bookmarked but lost them in a computer crash.

[PA Democrat]

6. What a load of crap. It began with Reagan closing the mental institutions without

funding services and supports for the mentally ill in the community at large. It was recently greatly exacerbated by cuts to Medicaid funding under Bush and the previous Republican Congress. A large number of people with serious mental health problems are dependent upon Medicaid for their treatment. Cuts to medicaid have not helped a system that was already struggling to meet the needs of people with mental illness.

From a 2005 article:

“ Indiscriminate Medicaid cuts could have a crippling effect at the local level and absolutely devastate the tens of thousands of people with mental illnesses and their families who rely on Medicaid to access needed services,” Linda Rosenberg, spokeswoman for the Campaign for Mental Health Reform and President and CEO of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare.

Medicaid is the single largest source of financing for mental health care and provides over half of state and local spending on mental health services. However, even with current federal support for Medicaid, one of every two Americans who need mental health treatment do not receive it, and the rate is even lower —and the quality of care poorer—for ethnic and racial minorities, according to the President’s Commission on Mental Health.

Without access to needed services, adults and children with mental illnesses face increased risk of school failure, unemployment, substance abuse, homelessness, arrest, incarceration, increased reliance on emergency facilities, and suicide. "Investing in services that enable individuals to improve and become or remain productive citizens saves resources in the long-term," said Bill Emmet, Director of the Campaign for Mental Health Reform.

http://www.mhreform.org/news/3-17-05housemedicaid.htm