Word: health
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...take billions of dollars. The state of Virginia alone would have to spend $500 million to begin providing adequate community treatment, according to a 1998 report prepared for it by consultants. Virginia's Governor, Jim Gilmore, has proposed spending $41 million instead. The Clinton plan would increase the mental-health grants that go to all states by just $70 million next year, to $358 million...
Domenici and Wellstone point out that the legislation is a solid long-term investment, since it would help people get treated before their illnesses become so severe that they lose their jobs or hurt themselves. Even business lobbyists admit that the cost increases for mental-health insurance will be small (maybe 1%). But they fear it will open the door to other mandates as well. "You have to remember that the Patient's Bill of Rights is being considered too," says Kate Sullivan of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, referring to the proposal in Congress to make it easier...
Prospects for the mental-health bill look even weaker in the House than in the Senate, where Domenici chairs the influential budget committee. House majority whip Tom DeLay of Texas, who has close ties to business groups, was 1 of just 17 members of the House to vote against a very weak 1996 version of the Domenici-Wellstone proposal; he also seems to have a deep suspicion of psychology in general. Just last month, he accused the American Psychological Association of trying to "normalize pedophilia" after the association published a study suggesting that not all childhood victims of sexual abuse...
Each state blundered differently. Washington State tied community mental-health spending to the size of welfare rolls, a sign of stigma itself. In Illinois, the state often paid nursing homes to take many of its patients. But old people and mentally ill people don't have the same needs, and few nursing homes hired the staff needed to treat the different set of patients. A bill before the Illinois legislature would require those hirings, but the efforts come too late for Russell Weston Jr. In 1996 he became an outpatient at an underfunded community mental-health center in Waterloo...
...take medication for depression, I would drink a quart of Jack Daniels every week to slow my thoughts enough to go to sleep," he said recently. At first he asked that the comment not be printed. But then he reconsidered: he is, after all, president of the National Mental Health Association, a 90-year-old advocacy group. "That's one of the pieces in this puzzle, to remove the shame," Faenza says. "It takes some courage to do that...