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What’s the difference between a person with a
mental illness and one with diabetes or a broken limb? Groups that
specialize in providing mental-health services would argue that the only
distinction is that, assuming they have enough health insurance to pay for
the treatment, people are more likely to seek help for a cracked femur than
for depression. “Unfortunately we haven’t done a very
good job of talking about mental health,” says Frank Anselmo, chief
executive officer of the Community Behavioral Healthcare Association of
Illinois in Springfield. The CBHA, which represents organizations that serve
the mental-health-care needs of people who can’t otherwise afford
care, recently launched a campaign designed to help an estimated 17,000
adults and children in Illinois cope with mental illnesses such as
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and alcohol and drug
addiction. The program, “Bridging the Health Care
Gap,” would expand mental services to children and teenagers in
schools, pay for home visits to senior citizens who can’t get out of
their homes, and fund additional bilingual mental-health counselors.
Providers of mental-health services in central Illinois would receive $3.9
million to assist roughly 839 children and 760 adults. Anselmo says that the beauty of Bridging the Health
Care Gap is that by drawing on $42 million from a special trust, known as
the Illinois Hospital Tax Assessment fund, providers will be able to
broaden care without any additional money from the state. The Legislature created the three-year hospital-tax
program in 2005 to attract $2 billion in federal matching funds. However, Anselmo and other mental-health-focused
not-for-profit groups worry that the assessment won’t be extended
beyond the sunset date of June 1. They also fear that the unused portion of
the hospital money — $10 million for mental-health care alone —
might be ultimately swept to help fill in holes elsewhere in the current
state budget. Danny Chun, spokesman for the Illinois Hospitals
Association, says that group supports renewal of the program because
hospitals provide much of the state’s acute mental-health services
for people who lack health insurance. He adds that the tax money, assessed
at a rate of 2.58 percent on adjusted revenues, provides hospitals with a
net gain once the federal reimbursement kicks in. Advocates for mentally ill patients argue that
psychological well-being is too often left out of discussions about health
care, both in terms of rhetoric and of funding. In a 2006 survey, the
National Alliance on Mental Illness ranked Illinois 34th in the nation in
funding for adults with severe mental illnesses. Illinois was the also the
largest state to receive a grade of F from NAMI. “It’s hard to have any kind of health if
you don’t have good mental health. The correlation has not been made
that mental health is a key component of health care,” says Lora
Thomas, executive director of NAMI of Illinois. She adds that without investment in community-based
mental-health programs, sick people are more likely to wind up in hospital
emergency departments, psychiatric institutions, or correctional facilities
— for which taxpayers ultimately pay more. “Mental-health crises cannot be back-burnered for six months,” Thomas says.
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2008.
