The Call - For Answers with Mental Health Advocate

Trump, DC Homelessness, and the National Guard

Claiming that D.C. crime is out of control, President Trump has brought in the National Guard. Never mind that crime rates are down in the District. The optics are compelling. Trump blames homeless people. As Fox News reported , he is giving them two choices – jail or homeless shelters to treat mental health and substance use disorders. If these choices seem reasonable, they aren’t. Sending someone to jail who hasn’t committed a crime is a bad, even unconstitutional, idea. Like our new South Florida gulag, this notion offends many of us. And many, if not most, of the people who are chronically homeless have seriously undertreated mental health conditions. Jails and shelters don’t have the money or resources to provide that treatment. What this boils down to is comfort. Seeing homeless people congregating makes some people uncomfortable. President Trump is suggesting that the freedom to congregate peacefully is a freedom reserved only to some of us – not everyone. There’s bigotry t...

The Ten Best and Ten Worst States for Your Mental Health

Connecticut spends four times more per capita on state mental health services than Texas. In Florida, 25 percent fewer people report having mental illnesses than in Washington. Across the nation, there are significant differences in the amounts states spend on mental health services. Connecticut spends $189 per capita, while Texas spends only $39. But there are also significant differences in the reported prevalence of mental illnesses. For example, fewer than 18 percent of Floridians report having a mental illness during the past year, but in Washington almost 24 percent do. But what happens when you put spending and prevalence together? Some new rankings emerge that give you a measure of each state’s real commitment to protecting mental health – and treating mental illness – in their population. This week, I have ranked all fifty states using both spending and prevalence data. I have taken per capita m...

Why the Republicans Have No Health Care Plan

There's a simple reason why (after more than a decade) Donald Trump and the Republicans have no plan to replace Obamacare. I'll explain in a few minutes. But first, some background. When the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) was passed in 2010, it was an effort to expand health care coverage to a lot of people who needed it, while controlling their costs. It had certain key provisions, not the least of which were that people couldn't be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, that all chronic diseases needed to be covered fairly, and lifetime coverage caps had to be lifted. The problem was that if you left matters to insurers to set insurance premiums based on what this would cost, the price of insurance would rise dramatically. So the government took a look at three different programs and ultimately put them together into one system. For people whose income was so low that they couldn't afford any real cost-sharing, the government expanded Medicaid. For elders...

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