Meantime, Mr. Jaffe continued to share his articles through facebook and the Huffington Post...
Quote:
Obama's failure to provide parity for mentally ill
... So if you're a state director of mental health, and DC says to you, "We won't pay for patients in hospitals", what would you do? The states do the same thing. They kick the patient's out of hospitals so they can 'return' to the community. Why? Because then Medicaid will pick up 50% of the cost of their care.
llene Wells had a brother, Paul who was killed by this policy...
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dj-jaffe/mental-health-parity-obam_b_443714.html
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The immediate impression you're given is that Ms. Wells brother died because he was kicked out of a state hospital. However, if you click through to
Ms. Well's blog and read her account of events, you discover that Paul died from lung cancer. He was living in a nursing home at the time and had received appropriate cancer treatments. Ms. Wells does not specify if his ongoing care and treatment was paid for by family members or state/federal funding.
Ms. Well's criticism seems to be that Paul was transferred to facilities that offered less supervision than that offered in state hospitals. She seems to feel her brother would have benefitted most in an environment of high supervision, expressing concern at one point for a time-frame when he was living independantly and not eating adequately. She questioned how officials could say on the one hand that Paul was so ill he would never recover and on the other, set him up in an independent living situation.
Meantime, if you also click on the link Mr. Jaffe provided for information on the Institutes for Mental Disease Exclusion (IMD) it leads to another article Mr. Jaffe wrote back in 1999 in which, once more, he singles out schizophrenics as a particularly menacing force in society...
Quote:
Not only does federal discrimination hurt the mentally ill, it affects the standard of living for everyone else, too. Many parks and public libraries, once enjoyed by all, are now rendered nearly unusable to the general community by the visions of lost, psychotic souls who need inpatient care but are locked out by the discrimination embedded in Medicaid law. Seemingly random acts of violence committed by individuals with a history of mental illness are frequently reported on the evening news. No amount of preaching by the Surgeon General against "stigma" will overcome the acts of a Russell Weston, a Ted Kaczynski or an Andrew Goldstein, all persons with untreated schizophrenia.
Source: http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=575&Itemid=196
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If you're looking for some background information on the IMD Exclusion that is less sensationalistic and biased, these links might serve to provide a more balanced background:
NAMI: Grading the States - Recommendations
Psychiatry Online: APA Discusses Health Reform With Obama Administration