mental healthcare
...community psychiatric hospital and the only one treating children also closed in 2001 – a few months of the DMC’s closure. It will have to lay off 271 staff members. The public mental health system treats the state’s indigent and most chronically mentally ill patients, about 32,000 of who are in Wayne County. Both hospitals, which handle a large number of Medicaid patients, say they are under the gun because, for years now, state and county dollars for psychiatric care have not kept pace with cost. Most of Aurora’s income comes from the Detroit-Wayne County Community Mental Health Agency, which hasn’t raised its modest $381-per-day rate since the 1995-96 fiscal year. The land that was previously Northville Regional Psychiatric Center will be auctioned off because of its closing. The announcement has incited strong reactions from both advocates for the mentally ill and those that want the property along the pricey Seven Mile corridor turned into housing and offices. The nearly 500 acres of hospital grounds could be worth up to $65 million, a state official estimated. Advocates for the state’s mentally ill insists closing Northville would be a devastating blow to a group already reeling from state hospital closures in the 1990s, said Mark Reinstein, a director for the mental health Association in Michigan. Powerful drugs that help control mental illness Mental Health Care Cuts 4 were cited as the chief reason behind the hospital closing. With many patients being covered by Medicaid, lengthy approval time for certain medication delayed services. Northville, more recently, housed about 300 patients, down from 1,500 in the 1980s. The state has closed 24 state mental health institutions since 1981, 16 since 1990. Currently, five state-operated hospitals and centers serve mentally ill adults and children and people with developmental disabilities. They are the Caro Center, Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital and Walter Ruether Psychiatric Hospital, which serve mentally ill adults, the Hawthorne Center, which serves mentally ill children, and the Mt. Pleasant Center, which serve developmentally disabled clients. There is also a system of private hospital care, providing short-term care for the mentally ill, that people access through private health insurance or out-of-pocket payment. In 1996 the federal Mental Health Parity Act was enacted, requiring the insurer to provide the same aggregated lifetime and annual limits for mental health coverage as they do for medical and surgical coverage. The law, which expired in 2001, applied to the treatment for mental illness, but it did not require insurers to cover mental health services. Mental Heath Care Cuts 5 In 2001, the Michigan Legislature introduced bills that address the parity issue. House bills 5123 and 5128 and the Senate bills 101-02 would require health insurer in Michigan to ensure that their cost-sharing requirements and benefits and service limitations for inpatient and outpatient mental health services are the same as those for inpatient and outpatient medical services. Like the expired federal law, these bills do not mandate mental health care coverage, but they differ from the federal in that the Michigan bill would require commercial insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, and HMOs to ensure that any cost-sharing amount or coverage limitation imposed on those requiring medical services, and the bills do not exempt small businesses (those with fewer than 50 employee) from providing such coverage for their workers. Several mental health organizations have joined the National Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing Association in its lawsuit against the state’s ne...