KEEP THE PROMISE

Keep the Promise Coalition
Golden Pen Opportunities!
KTP Advocates…GET YOUR PENS OUT!!

Okay Coalition members, here is a perfect opportunity to educate and inform the community about critical mental health issues … and you can qualify for a Golden Pen Award at the Annual Keep the Promise Awards ceremony in the Fall!

We encourage members to write letters to the editor in response to a powerful editorial from the Hartford Courant.

Please see Monday's Editorial from the Hartford Courant copied below.

PLEASE ACT NOW! Newspapers are normally willing to print responses or other letters within a few days. Be sure to reference the article you are writing in support of. You can go to the KTP web site for a state list of newspapers and to find tips for writing your letter at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=9FCRwJ9s3C0uuCaWLfVUWFZzygS3IR8n or contact Cheri or Maura directly at: (800) 215-3021. Be sure to send KTP a copy if your letter is published in order to get credit for a Golden Pen Award. Get your ideas into the media TODAY!

Cheri BraggKTP Coordinator(860) 882-0236; (800) 215-3021
keepthepromise@namict.org

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=rauUld91602WMRSF2kfEJlZzygS3IR8n

Back To The Future
June 2, 2008

Connecticut officials had years ago promised to provide mentally ill patients with housing and community-based services to replace costly state psychiatric hospitals that were closing because they were draining the state's coffers.

Lawmakers largely broke their promise, forcing huge numbers of people with mental illness to languish in nursing homes and state prisons, sometimes under bad conditions. The state is now paying for its neglect.

Federal officials last year denied Connecticut $1 million in Medicaid reimbursements because mental health patients exceeded 50 percent of the population at several of the state's nursing homes. By law, nursing homes in which more than half the patients are mentally ill automatically lose their federal Medicaid funding and are reclassified as de facto psychiatric hospitals.

Connecticut expects to lose another $6.5 million in Medicaid reimbursements this year for the same reason. State officials also face a federal class-action lawsuit that accuses them of warehousing the mentally ill in nursing homes.

Had the state done what it promised long ago, it wouldn't be in this mess.

Advocates estimate that there are 3,700 mentally ill patients, most of them under 65, living in nursing homes. Many of them are capable of living in the community with some help. The best that Gov. M. Jodi Rell could do this year to alleviate the problem was offer $9.5 million in proposed budget adjustments over two years for additional community beds and improved screening for the mentally ill. She has dropped the proposal now that rapidly dwindling tax revenues have compelled her and the General Assembly to live with a "do-nothing" budget this year.

The irony is that it costs the state more to keep mental patients in nursing homes than it would to provide housing and community-based mental health programs.Without community housing, the state is resorting to the same expensive warehousing system it did away with over the last four decades.

Copyright © 2008, The Hartford Courant