Arizona's Public Behavioral Health System: Critical Issues for Critical Times

Arizona's Public Behavioral Health System: Critical Issues for Critical Times prepared jointly by ASU’s Center for Applied Behavior Health Policy and Morrison Institute for Public Policy, notes that Arizona’s billion-dollar public behavioral health system, which serves 150,000 ill residents and their families, is inadequately staffed and struggling under budget cuts and the demands of a 28-year-old class-action law suit.

Among the findings of the report:

35% of Arizona adults with serious mental illness do not qualify for AHCCCS/Medicaid, primarily because they are working poor and uninsured, and thus are at risk for inadequate treatment
Funds for housing and food to support patients’ recovery are essential, yet are not provided to even patients covered by AHCCCS/Medicaid because they are not considered "medically necessary"
Budget pressures put Arizonans at risk through cuts to crisis services, which not only avert suicides and drug overdoses, but provide vital assistance to local hospitals and local law enforcement officials.
The report’s release comes just weeks after Governor Jan Brewer’s October 9th call for a major reorganization of the statewide system.

Arizona's second-class status for behavioral health care

Some of Arizonans’ most common and destructive illnesses—those of the brain—are failing to receive adequate treatment due to a combination of modern governmental gridlock and a centuries-old philosophythat separates the mind from the body.
That is among the findings of a new publication by Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University.
"Arizona’s Mind-Body Problem: Mental Health Systems and Choices" is the latest issue in the Institute’s Forum 411 policy briefing series.
The eight-page report looks at why mental health care has been relegated to second-class status, resulting in markedly fewer benefits for Arizonans with private insurance and a public system that has long has been criticized as underfunded, understaffed, and highly uneven in its quality of care.
How severe is the gridlock?
Arizona’s system, which spends more than $1 billion annually, has been embroiled in a major class-action lawsuit for 28 years.
National studies have repeatedly shown that mental disorders, from phobias and panic attacks to schizophrenia, are widespread throughout the population, inflict suffering on millions of individuals and their families, and cost society billions in lost production.
Most people still shrink from the stigma of acknowledging mental problems, and most health care providers still labor under the false premise — refuted by the U.S. Surgeon General and other authorities — that problems of the mind should be dealt with separately from problems of the body.
Arizona’s Mind-Body Problem offers a range of policy choices, ranging from combating the stigma of mental illness to merging the public system with Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (Arizona's version of Medicaid).
To read the full version of Arizona’s Mind-Body Problem, go to http://morrisoninstitute.asu.edu/
This Forum 411 on mental health is scheduled to be presented on June 17 to the Arizona Senate Committee on Healthcare and Medical Liability Reform.
Sponsored by Westcor, Forum 411 is a quarterly briefing series offering policy, business, and community leaders information on Arizona’s critical issues.
Morrison Institute is an independent and non-partisan public policy research organization based at Arizona State University as part of the College of Public Programs. The Institute is located in downtown Phoenix.