From our neighbors to the south but similar to what is going on in Georgia. The breaking point maybe a reality soon as politicians attempt to give more money and tax breaks to the rich and while more and more people do not want to provide services with tax money to poor folks.
Judge: Don’t cut mental health
By Jim Ash
FLORIDA CAPITAL BUREAU CHIEF
Hard-pressed lawmakers may think they can save millions by slashing the state’s mental-health budget, but they’re making a big mistake.
So warns a veteran South Florida judge in charge of a Supreme Court task force that is on the verge of overhauling a system already so broken by budget cuts he says it can’t survive any more.
”It may look like a savings, but it’s quite the opposite,” said Steven Leifman, an associate administrative judge from Miami. ”When you force people out of the mental-health system, you force them into the criminal-justice system.”
Some cuts will be inevitable as the Legislature looks to plug a $1.1 billion hole in the state budget. Social services and education make up two-thirds of the $71 billion-plus spending plan.
But lawmakers risk flooding more jails, prisons and shelters with the mentally ill if they cut too deeply into a mental-health system already ranked 48th in the nation in terms of per-capita spending, Leifman said.
It’s the same trend that inspired Chief Justice Fred Lewis this April to form the task force and appoint Leifman as a special adviser for criminal justice and mental health.
It was also Lewis’ response to the latest scandal to engulf the Florida Department of Children and Families and the Legislature’s penchant for cutting social-service spending whenever times are lean.
Circuit judges in Jacksonville, Miami and Fort Lauderdale threatened last year to hold the former department secretary in contempt for allowing the mentally ill to languish in jail after they had been found incompetent to stand trial.
Florida law requires that the department move them to a mental-health facility within 15 days. Some were jailed for months without the state-required treatment. Lawmakers ultimately were forced to come up with $48 million for 300 new treatment beds.
Advocates hope the example will stay with lawmakers as they hunt for savings this year and next.
Sen. Durell Peaden, a Crestview Republican who chairs the committee that oversees the department’s budget, says the memory is still fresh for him.
Peaden put $2.5 million in the budget this spring for more treatment beds in his Northwest Florida district after a mentally ill inmate died in the Escambia County Jail. Guards say they were forced to shock him with Tasers.
”I know everybody is up in arms. We’re trying to do 4-percent, 4-and-a-half-percent cuts without trying to get to the meat of things,” Peaden said, ”We’re trying to have surgical cuts.”
No one thinks the job will be easy. Legislative leaders on Wednesday indefinitely postponed a special budget-cutting session that was supposed to be set for Sept. 18. The House and Senate could not agree how and where to make the cuts.
Gov. Charlie Crist followed up the next day with a set of his own proposals after ordering his agency chiefs earlier this year to suggest cuts up to 10 percent.
Mental-health advocates have been bracing for up to $60 million in cuts ever since, although the exact level is still up in the air.
Crist’s latest proposal would slash health and social-service spending by $376 million. The bulk of the money would come from cutting the amount of money Medicaid pays to hospitals and other treatment facilities.
Department of Children and Families Secretary Bob Butterworth said the cuts could be made without hurting clients.
But Peaden acknowledged that it will be impossible not to cut some services, especially if Senate President Ken Pruitt sticks to his pledge to make across-the-board cuts.
Advocates shuddered at the department’s original proposal to cut up to $60 million from the state’s $800 million mental health and substance abuse budget. Department administrators, racing to study Crist’s proposals, say the figure will be more like $16.6 million.
Mental health advocates say that in a state where only 47 percent of the need for services is met, any cuts would be devastating.
The cuts would likely mean more people unable to get into acute care or residential facilities, or longer waits and shorter stays for those who do, said Bob Sharpe, president of the Florida Council for Community Mental Health.
”We’re already 48th in the nation in per capita spending, we don’t have many more slots to go down,” Sharpe said.
Filed under: Health Care Policy, Mental Health, Poverty, Rural, The Southern States
