Humane or Insane?    
    

We were going to show how to make an easy $50,000 a week, 

protect yourself from the top 42 causes of disease, and assure 

that all 330,000 million Americans love you unconditionally. 

   Until we found a more interesting topic, something Donald Trump, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg can agree on. 

   Hundreds of thousands of Americans with serious mental illness sleep on the streets, in the woods, in shelters or in prisons. Less than 40,000 are in state hospitals. 

   This embarrassment results from the 1965 law that established Medicaid. It prevents aid for mentally ill adults in hospitals, or adult homes with more than 16 beds. 

   Many mistakenly believed new drugs and community mental-health centers would end the need for institutions, says D.J. Jaffe, author of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill. 

   It's been a disaster, he writes in the Wall Street Journal. Before Medicaid, states paid for readily available but under-funded hospitalization. Then states realized that if they discharged patients, Medicaid would pay half the cost of whatever care they could get. More than 450,000 mental-hospital beds have been lost since the 1950s.  

   Rep. E.B. Johnson, Texas Democrat, a former psychiatric nurse, introduced bills to abolish what's called the IMD Exclusion. Trump, Klobuchar and Buttigieg all support the idea. Bernie Sanders is opposed.

   Jaffe says civil libertarians and mental-health advocates argue, despite the evidence, that institutions aren't needed. The number of mentally ill people is roughly the same as in the 1950s, when most were in hospitals. 

   The 1965 Exclusion turns business districts into homeless camps, he says, forcing police to run shadow mental-health systems and driving up costs.

   With proper funding plus Medicaid dollars, psychiatric hospitals would deliver therapeutic care, Jaffe claims. 

      Jimmy