New York Gov. Pataki Must Not ‘Retreat’ From Helping Mentally Ill, Editorial Says

New York Gov. George Pataki's (R) and state Health Commissioner Dr. Antonia Novello's "bold promise" to change the "world that New York's mentally ill adults have been trapped in for all these years" must be kept, according to an Albany Times Union editorial (Albany Times Union, 9/25). On Sept. 23, a state advisory panel - created in response to a New York Times investigative series that found the state's adult homes for the mentally ill had become "little more than psychiatric flophouses" - released recommendations calling for more than 5,000 new units of housing for people with mental illnesses to be built over the next 10 years. This housing should include both private apartments "visited regularly by case managers" and housing developments with on-site social services, the panel said (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 9/24). To revamp the mental health care system, the editorial says New York needs at least $500 million to hire as many as 1,000 nurses and trained mental health workers to care for patients and follow the panel's recommendation to replace the "flophouses" with 5,000 group homes. The cost of the reforms is "the accumulated price of the utter failure of taking the mentally ill out of the large warehouse-like institutions that were scandals in their own right and moving them" into group homes, according to the editorial. Depite the Pataki administration's pledge to reform the system, "merely endors[ing] a list of entirely sensible and humane recommendations isn't enough," the Times Union says. The editorial adds that Pataki and the Legislature "have demonstrated again and again that they prefer talking, and posturing, about urgent matters as an overhaul of mental health care." In addition, the "timing for making good on such a promise couldn't be worse," given the state's expected $5 billion to $10 billion budget deficit next year and "doubts" about whether Medicaid will pay more for caring for the mentally ill, the Times Union says. For a "better way of treatment to become a reality," mental health care "will have to go to the top of the list of what the state government absolutely must do," the editorial concludes (Albany Times Union, 9/25).