[I have a (brother/sister/child/etc.) who has (schizophrenia/manic-depression)]
or
[I am a mental illness consumer]
and I am very concerned about discriminatory federal Medicaid policy towards the severely mentally ill.

If you get sick with almost any disease and are unable to pay for appropriate treatment, federal Medicaid funds help pay for your care. But, if you are between the ages of 21 and 65 and have a severe mental illness that requires hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital, the federal Institutions for Mental Disease (IMD) rule bars the use of Medicaid funds for your treatment.

As a result, state psychiatric hospitals are locking the front door and opening the back, making it increasingly difficult for the most severely ill to get inpatient treatment. They are discharging patients sicker and quicker so that states can receive federal Medicaid reimbursement for any treatment they provide.

One result of this policy is that there are now effectively 93% fewer beds in state psychiatric hospitals than there were 45 years ago. By the Justice Department's own statistics, there are currently about 283,800 mentally ill people locked up in the nation's jails and prisons. An estimated 200,000 of the nations 600,000 homeless persons are mentally ill. Of the 4 million Americans with schizophrenia and manic-depression, 50% (2 million) are not being treated. By contrast, there are fewer than 60,000 state psychiatric hospital beds and the number is dropping.

[In my own experience…]

I urge you to support repeal of this misguided policy that discriminates against the severely mentally ill and causes untold misery for them and their loved ones.

Sincerely yours,

Treatment Advocacy Center

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