concept: why the rush?

The Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Services, Mental Health Division, has said that there will be no funding for the County's Regional Support Teams (RSTs) effective July 1st, 2009. About 9,000 Sacramentans with mental illness will have no place to go for the medications that have kept them in the community.

UPDATE: With far too little notice for any patient or program to prepare, the County has announced that they will keep the RSTs open, but at less than half their current capacity. To churlishly avoid charges of abandoning five thousand citizens, they are "assigning" them to other clinical programs. But when you "assign" 1,500 patients to a clinic structured and funded for 250, will anyone actually get care? This deceptive shell game actually displaces far more than the 5,000 RST patients. It destroys small, successful, cost-effective programs that currently care for thousands more.

This will not save money. Our friends, neighbors, and family members with mental illness will have no choice but to seek care in emergency rooms (at $2,500+ per visit, borne by the County) or the Sacramento County Mental Health Treatment Center (currently overcrowded and sending patients to expensive private psychiatric hospitals at County expense). Some will end up receiving their care in the county jail, perhaps the most expensive and inhumane way known to deliver medical and psychiatric care. The unlucky will get care only with a visit to the County Coroner.

Closing the RSTs will affect the quality of life of every person living in Sacramento County.

We can replace the RSTs with cost-effective psychiatric care, but the deadline of July 1st is impossible.

We propose to do the impossible, but we need a small amount of seed money now.

Proceed to implementation