Huge budget cuts in North Carolina Mental Health
Some of you that know me know that I work in the mental health field. Today I received several emails about future budget cuts that will take effect very quickly. It made me glad that I no longer work in Community Support since it looks as if that service may be cut altogether (I’ll omit the Airplane joke here). This bothers me and I’ll quickly explain why. I won’t go into rant or get up on a soapbox….well…not for long I won’t.
Although certain companies were milking the system by going door to door and asking people if they had Medicaid and then signing up those people for services, not all companies were doing so. The media sort of painted the picture that all Community Support was just going door to door and doing glorified baby sitting, but this was not the case. There were some people that we helped that had no resources. There were adults that were living in places not designed to live in, with no income, no medical care, limited food, etc… This is where state funds were able to come in and help these folks. Of course, several months ago those were cut in our area and it sounds like will be cut throughout the state by the end of the month. That dropped the people in the most need back to where they were. We were able to set up natural support networks in a lot of cases and help some find places to live…but…the income thing. That is very difficult in small town North Carolina (or anywhere most likely) to set up. In NC currently it takes a MINIMUM of 2 years to get disability, if you can get it at all. I’ve worked with some very needy people that had to wait for years.
I heard all the time that these people just needed to get jobs. Some people can get jobs. Most everyone I worked with wanted jobs. The challenges come when they have difficulty working for physical reasons. Another challenge is that when you live in the country and you don’t have a car, you don’t have any money, and there is not public transportation and you don’t know many people….how do you get to work?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any answers either. It’s tough. I understand that if people aren’t paying as much taxes, then tax cuts have to be made. It also stands to reason though, that when you cut whole branches of services that could potentially (and most likely) knock service providers out of business this affects the bigger picture. This will be a tax burden as well. That’s also an entire new list of people that will not be paying income taxes and will have to cut back on spending on items that have sales tax. These people will also be on unemployment (tax drain) and will take advantage of education programs through Employment Security Commission and the Community Colleges which are run by what? Tax money!
Ok…I’ll stop the rant now. It’s a concern though. This could just be a downward spiral. I think you have to look at both sides of the equation to see if you spend more in unemployment, disability, education, vocational rehabilitation, state hospitals, etc… from lack of employment and lack of a service that was working to decrease those expenses in the people we supported.
