With the close of this session of the Missouri legislature on May 13, a budget was finally passed for the Missouri Department of Mental Health (DMH) for the coming year (Fiscal Year 2012.)
Here are the damages:
| General Revenue | $563,509,258 |
| Federal Funds | $632,094,832 |
| Other Funds | $42,469,399 |
| Total | $1,238,073,489 |
| Per Capita | $207 |
General Revenue consists of individual and corporate state income taxes, sales and use taxes, and other general income. Federal Funds come from the U.S. Federal Government (taxes again, and likely a healthy dose of borrowed money.) Other Funds include various special purpose trusts.
The total this year, over $1.2 billion dollars, is slightly greater than last year’s budget. Based on the current state population of nearly 6 million, that averages to $207 per person.
Several salient points can be made from the graph of Missouri DMH budgets over the last 41 years.
1. There was a huge jump in the budget starting in 2004.
2. Most of that huge jump has been federal money.
3. Are you kidding? $1.2 billion dollars out of, roughly, $23 billion for the whole state? That’s about 5% of the whole state budget!
Something Can Be Done About It
Although this budget has been passed for the coming year, it is not too soon to start visiting, calling and writing your local, state and federal officials and representatives to make your views known for the next set of budget deliberations. Here are some suggestions.
Giving more tax dollars to the Department of Mental Health merely perpetuates the cycle of state tax largesse and promotes psychiatric fraud and abuse. Curtailing and cutting the budget would force the Department of Mental Health to reduce their costs, thereby forcing useless and unnecessary state institutions either to improve their services or close shop.
A budget cut would force the Department of Mental Health to re-evaluate all citizens held in state custody and thus force the Department to recommend release of those who are no longer deemed a threat, thus saving the state more money. It is an obvious fact that the more patients, residents and clients the Department must care for, the more tax money they can ask for.
The Department of Mental Health is an easy place to cut spending in the effort to save our health care system, as the citizens of this state have long used the Department of Mental health as an emergency health care provider. The unprecedented use of Missouri’s Mental Health psychiatric facilities as emergency health care has hidden a long overlooked problem that the state’s poorer citizens are enduring.
It may be time to consider the idea of folding the Department of Mental Health into the Department of Health and Senior Services; to restructure the Department of Mental Health and allow the new system to provide emergency medical services to this state’s poorer citizens.
Establish rights for patients and their insurance companies to receive refunds for mental health treatment which did not achieve the promised result or improvement, or which resulted in proven harm to the individual, thereby ensuring that responsibility lies with the individual practitioner and psychiatric facility rather than the government or its agencies.
Provide funding and insurance coverage only for proven, workable treatments that verifiably and dramatically improve or cure mental health problems.
Become a member of CCHR St. Louis and help support the purpose of restoring human rights to the field of mental health.