$1 billion for mental health care? GOP lawmakers' plan for NC advances in House
A $1 billion mental health-care package — that some believe could help curb drug addiction, crime, homelessness, rising suicide rates and other social ills — advanced in the state House Tuesday.
The Republican-backed plan, House Bill 855, was filed last month and faced its first committee hearing Tuesday morning. It would split the money up into dozens of multimillion-dollar programs all over the state, each focusing on a different piece of the puzzle.
Public schools would get $40 million for more behavioral health programs. Another $40 million would go to expanding a suicide hotline and creating mobile response teams for people in crisis. There’s $20 million aimed at cutting down on homelessness, $78 million for substance abuse clinics and related work, plus hundreds of millions more.
The bill passed the committee unanimously, the first of several steps before it can potentially become law.
Rep. Donny Lambeth, a Winston-Salem Republican and retired hospital executive, said the state's suicide rate has tripled in just the last five years, since 2018. In total, he said, experts believe the majority of people with mental health problems aren't getting treatment. And even when people do seek help, he said, especially for in the most serious cases, they're often forced to wait for a long time because there aren't enough health care workers, or mental health hospital beds, to treat everyone.
As of Tuesday morning, Lambeth said, more than 300 people were stuck in hospital emergency rooms statewide, waiting for a bed to open up in a mental health hospital.
A large portion of the money would go toward helping hospitals and doctors’ offices, particularly in rural areas, stay open.
The rural parts of the state are not only struggling economically but have also been hit harder by the opioid epidemic than the state’s wealthier urban areas. There’s $225 million set aside to pay providers more than normal for giving mental health care to people on Medicaid, a government insurance program for the working poor. Another $50 million would help rural health providers with loan repayments.
Earlier this year Lambeth told WRAL News that since the federal government will pay North Carolina $1.8 billion as a sort of signing bonus for approving Medicaid expansion, he’d like to take the money and expand the state’s mental health capabilities.
“I talk to families every week that have issues, and part of the issue is we need more funding,” said Lambeth, who’s also a top state budget writer, previously told WRAL. “We need more access points. We need more crisis centers. We need to address how to take care of these people.”
Jails and prisons are currently the state’s biggest mental health providers, not just because of crimes related to substance abuse or mental health issues, but also because there are relatively few other options to treat people, like in state-run mental hospitals.
So in addition to the $100 million Lambeth’s bill would spend expanding the number of beds in those state-run mental hospitals, it would also spend $150 million on the law enforcement side.
Most of that would go to diversion programs that seek to stop people from getting arrested in the first place — or to make sure that people have help when they’re being released from custody, so that they don’t end up behind bars again.
