Missouri Mental Health Budget Out Of Control
Missouri’s budget for the coming year is contained in a series of House Bills (HBs), passed by the end of the legislative session and forwarded to Governor Nixon for his approval.
Missouri State Senator David Sater (Republican-District 29) had this to say in the Branson Tri-Lakes News on May 6, 2015: “This budget will also begin to contain the ever-growing Departments of Mental Health, Health and Senior Services and Social Services in HBs 10 and 11. These departments spend huge a portion of the state budget and have done so uncontrollably and unsupervised for years, and they continue to ask for more money year after year. Almost every extra dollar in revenue we have goes to HBs 10 and 11 and there is nothing left over to fulfill our commitments to educating our kids or ensuring we have safe roads and infrastructure.”
The Department of Mental Health has a budget for the coming year of $1,836,521,148. Health and Senior Services budget is $1,253,241,755; the Department of Social Services budget is $8,609,187,275.
While the legislative session is over for the year, it is important for all Missouri citizens to make their viewpoints known to their state representatives and senators, and to express their concern over the out-of-control Department of Mental Health budget. And thank Senator Sater for his understanding.
We think it is time for the Missouri legislature to call psychiatry and psychology for what it is — A failed pseudo science with no basis in fact, a pseudo science that harms its recipients and lines the pocketbooks of its practitioners.
Giving more tax dollars to the Department of Mental Health merely perpetuates the cycle of state tax largesse. Curtailing and cutting the budget will force the Department of Mental Health to reduce their costs, thereby forcing useless and unnecessary state institutions either to improve their services or close shop.
A budget cut will force the Department of Mental Health to re-evaluate all citizens held in state custody and thus force the Department to recommend release of those who are no longer deemed a threat to the body politic thus saving the state more money. It is an obvious fact that the more patients, residents and clients the Department must care for, the more tax money they can ask for.
Those citizens who are no longer deemed a threat need to be unconditionally released. This will allow these citizens to return to their families and to make the readjustment back into a tax paying citizen.
Increasing the Department of Mental Health’s budget covers expensive, addictive and harmful psychiatric drugs as necessary medical costs. For example, to date there have been 72 warnings against antipsychotics issued by regulators in eight countries.
The state is not primarily responsible for a person’s entire life, thus the Department of Mental Health is not responsible for a citizen’s entire life. Some citizens need to be cared for but the primary responsibility lies first with the individual, then his family, then his religious affiliation, then the state government and finally the federal government.
The Department of Mental Health is an easy place to cut spending in the long, difficult effort to save our health-care system, as the citizens of this state have long used the Department of Mental health as an emergency health care provider. The unprecedented use of Missouri’s Mental Health psychiatric facilities as emergency health care has hidden a long overlooked problem that the state’s poorer citizens are enduring.
It may be time to consider the idea of folding the Department of Mental Health into the Department of Health and Senior Services; to restructure the Department of Mental Health and allow the new system to provide emergency medical services to this state’s poorer citizens.
The Department of Mental Health’s motto should be “We care for those who cannot care for themselves”; not “We want to care for all”. The currently available psychiatric “treatments” are not care, they are fraudulent and abusive.
Click here for more information about psychiatric fraud.