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| 2/12/2003 | Email this article • Print this article
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| Terry Edvalson explains his concerns about state mental-health agency funding while regional economic development director Rick Minster listens as part of the Eastern Oregon Rural Alliance. The Eagle/DAVID CARKHUFF |
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Duo: Mental-health system flawed
By David Carkhuff
Editor
JOHN DAY — A drug addict or a troubled youth in need of counseling could fall through the cracks if the state does not reform its mental-health funding system, consultants warned a regional alliance Friday.
“It appears to us we’re going to have a lot of folks placed in county jails,” instead of them being evaluated for mental-health treatment, warned Kevin Campbell, consultant with Two Oregons Inc. of Salem.
In a sense, Campbell and Terry Edvalson, both affiliated with the Eastern Oregon Human Services Consortium, were preaching to the choir when they issued their stern warnings to the Eastern Oregon Rural Alliance on Feb. 7. The alliance is a new coalition of county leaders, health officials, economic developers and other officials hoping to educate the Oregon Legislature about the region’s economic and social problems. The alliance met in John Day to continue strategizing its lobbying effort for the 2003 legislative session.
By warning about the pinch being felt locally from state budget cuts to human-services budgets, Campbell and Edvalson did not tell the alliance much that members didn’t already know.
However, the pair was not just pleading for more money from Salem. Instead, they suggested improvements that could allow county agencies to tap local client fees, insurance payments, fines and other funds to leverage federal money into the state.
“Right now, just looking at Grant County’s audit for last year, we can identify about $106,000 of existing funds that came through the Grant County mental health department” that could have been used as matching funds, Campbell explained after the meeting. Those dollars include client fees, interest and insurance revenue that the state did not match against federal grants such as Medicare.
“That $106,000 would get you about $163,000 of federal dollars,” he said.
The problem is: “There’s not a mechanism currently in the state for the county to easily be able to do that,” Campbell explained.
A state that is millions of dollars short of cash, based on revenue forecasts, should not be turning away millions of dollars of federal funding because of bureaucratic inflexibility, Campbell said.
“We’re in danger of leaving about a billion dollars of federal dollars on the table in the next biennium,” he said.
The Eastern Oregon Rural Alliance will be asked to try to craft a solution into legislation, tentatively by the next alliance meeting in John Day on Friday, March 7.
Campbell and Edvalson agreed that the worst-case scenarios they described have not yet occurred. County mental-health departments have taken up the slack.
“Every county out here is trying to hold the line,” Edvalson said. “They can only hold the line so long without some changes happening.”
“It makes no sense whatever to save $1,200 by cutting crisis care in your county,” Campbell told the alliance.
Between Feb. 1 and June 30, the Oregon Department of Human Services instituted $872,380 of funding reductions to county-based community crisis services — money to pay staff to respond to human emergencies such as suicide threats. Counties are finding ways to cover these shortfalls, Edvalson said, but the struggling economy adds to their burden.
“You start getting more and more people in crisis, and you have to move your staff people from prevention and intervention to crisis mode,” he explained.
Campbell said 110,000 Oregonians just lost Oregon Health Plan benefits for alcohol and drug treatment, dental care and mental health services due to state budget reductions.
“Those folks are predominately the working poor,” he said.
For citizens already hard hit by the state’s recession, it’s a wrongheaded strategy for saving money, he said.
“If I’m going to lose my health insurance if I keep my job, that’s pretty grim,” he said.
Sen. David Nelson, R-Pendleton, and Rep. Tom Butler, R-Ontario, are among the legislators who already recognize these problems, so the consortium is optimistic of a legislative fix.
“The main issue here is really introducing a change to the system that moves us in a direction that’s different from where we’ve ever gone before,” Campbell said.
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