After years of budget cuts that battered the state’s already fragile mental-health system, a push is on in the legislature to restore funds.
Using money made available by last year’s passage of Referendum C, state lawmakers are seeking to give back some of the $25 million cut from mental-health programs since 2002.
“I do think relief is probably in sight,” said Dr. Carl Clark, chief executive of Mental Health Corp. of Denver.
Mental Health Corp. of Denver and other community centers treating uninsured patients could get $5.8 million in the next fiscal year.
A program for emotionally troubled children whose parents lack insurance – a program eliminated in 2003 – may get $700,000.
The cuts were made during the past three years to balance the state’s budget.
Referendum C, passed by voters last fall, has allowed the state to use tax dollars that it otherwise would have been forced to refund.
Rep. Bernie Buescher, a Grand Junction Democrat on the Joint Budget Committee, said lawmakers carefully review restoring funds.
“We have been so slow and so careful about doing this,” to ensure that the increased funding can be sustained, he said. “We don’t want to create false hopes.”
From 2003 to 2005, an estimated 3,400 indigent people lost mental-health care altogether, according to the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council.
At the same time, state rates for treating people disabled by their illness dropped 13 percent, the council said.
Mental Health Corp. of Denver closed a clinic, laid off staff and cut services to 500 uninsured clients.
The center found treatment for about half of those clients.
“But honestly, I don’t know what happened to a lot of those other folks,” Clark said.
In the past, many of them might have wound up in one of the state’s two hospitals for the mentally ill.
But those facilities, in Pueblo and Denver, lost more than $15 million – resulting in a 16 percent cut in staff and the loss of 179 beds.
Statewide in the past four years, there has been a 38 percent drop in psychiatric beds – to 876 – in both private and public hospitals, according to the Colorado Health & Hospital Association.
Children’s mental-health funds were cut by 68 percent in 2003 and 2004. About 2,500 children either had mental- health services decreased or lost them entirely, according to the health care council report.
Last week, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a Washington-based advocacy group, released a survey that graded state programs.
Colorado got a “U” for unresponsive.
State officials had told the alliance they did not have the staff to fill out the survey.
Staff cuts have left the mental-health division of the state Department of Human Services so depleted that no one had time to answer the questions, said department spokeswoman Liz McDonough.
That “reflects the problem in this state,” said Clark, of Mental Health Corp. of Denver.
While Colorado didn’t participate, alliance researchers did find that from 2003 to 2005, the number of emergency-room visits by Coloradans on Medicaid or without insurance who needed mental-health or substance- abuse treatment jumped 83 percent.
The survey also noted that Colorado had the nation’s seventh-highest suicide rate and ranked 33rd in per-capita mental-health-care spending among the states.
No state got an A in the survey. Connecticut and Ohio earned B’s. Eight states got F’s, including Iowa, Illinois, Kansas and Montana.
New York was the only state that failed to respond at all.
As a whole, the nation got a D.
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-820-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
