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Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

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Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#71

Post by astrodust »

will_brown wrote: post #61
astrodust wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most of the state will be part of the ocean within fifty years, but don't worry people, we've slashed services so the budget's balanced and your taxes won't go up." Sometimes you need to spend money to protect against a future where the costs are even higher. The mosquito control initiative could have paid for itself with the sales taxes on that $5.5B in revenue that never happened.

Agreed, but sometimes there is no money to spend, and that's my point...it is purely a budget issue not a political one. When your State budget goes from say $70B down to $60B (including a stimulus package from the federal government) and the state is already $200B in debt where does the money come from? Had the republican (turned independent, turned democrat) governor Crist known saving $5.5M would cost $5.5B he wou…

Where do you get that money? I bet you could shake $100M out of the prison system if you looked for cases of people being locked up for ridiculously trivial offenses. Given how prisoners often cost $40-60K per year, wouldn't take that many.

I don't expect people to be psychic, but common sense must apply here. When you "save money" by slashing budgets on road repairs, and ten years later your roads are so awful you have to replace them all at great expense, is that really savings?

A bridge that's deteriorating is expensive to fix. A bridge that's collapsed from lack of maintenance is crazy expensive to replace.

The so-called fiscal conservatives are always looking at saving money now, they don't seem to care about what happens tomorrow.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#72

Post by pessimizer »

connoredel wrote: post #23
mrits wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one route to nationalization. Increase regulation, make impossible to manage until nobody believes the company can do the job, then add it to your political platform.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. You astutely point out that just as defunding can cause a move toward privatization (or the belief that only private enterprise can solve a given problem), so too can overregulation lead toward nationalization (or even at state/local levels, the belief that only government can solve it).

I won't downvote it if anyone can show an example of it actually ever happening.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#73

Post by pessimizer »

tn13 wrote: post #63
jmcgough wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When mental health services are cut, the burden doesn't go away but gets picked up by police and hospitals, who aren't properly equipped to handle those challenges. The SFPD and ambulances spend massive amounts of time responding to emergencies involving mentally ill homeless, which limits their ability to respond to other problems.

My question was what is the total cost of Florida's mental hospitals and if that is worth it. Assuming that $100M cut was a 10% cut it means that the total expenditure could be $1B. Which looks ridiculously high for merely 20M population of Florida. Of course there is a whole point of whether government ought to spend some money now to avoid spending on basic services later whether there are proper studies done and i…

> Which looks ridiculously high for merely 20M population of Florida.

Based on...?

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#74

Post by Keverw »

nameless912 wrote: post #68
Keverw wrote: post #45

What do mental health services do anyways? Just give kids meth in a pill for not paying attention to boring school topics? You can be locked up, drugged, shocked, lobotomized. No rights to an attorney, not even a one phone call. I really believe the whole psychiatric industry is a fraud. Leon Eisenberg admitted ADHD being fake when he died.

As someone who is an inconsolable bipolar wreck without therapy and medications, go fuck yourself. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about on this topic.

They're probably some real mental illnesses but probably much less than actually listed in the DSM book. I just think the industry is quick to give people pills and the people who write the DSM have financial ties to the industry.

3,000 people a month die because of psychiatry. We don't ever hear about these victims. There was a court case where a psychiatrist testified and was questioned about what tests he ran on the person he was claiming had a chemical imbalance. He was questioned what kind of tests he did and he said he watched him for 2 hours. No actual medical tests. It's very subjective and not scientific in most cases.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#75

Post by rtpg »

will_brown wrote: post #61
astrodust wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most of the state will be part of the ocean within fifty years, but don't worry people, we've slashed services so the budget's balanced and your taxes won't go up." Sometimes you need to spend money to protect against a future where the costs are even higher. The mosquito control initiative could have paid for itself with the sales taxes on that $5.5B in revenue that never happened.

Agreed, but sometimes there is no money to spend, and that's my point...it is purely a budget issue not a political one. When your State budget goes from say $70B down to $60B (including a stimulus package from the federal government) and the state is already $200B in debt where does the money come from? Had the republican (turned independent, turned democrat) governor Crist known saving $5.5M would cost $5.5B he wou…

It can come from where the first $200B came from : bonds and debt.

The mosquito thing in particular, you could totally say "Year N's costs will get covered in year N+2's sales taxes"

This is, of course, assuming that revenue increases. But all else being equal, inflation makes this happen

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#76

Post by zd4akaq85a »

tn13 wrote: post #63
jmcgough wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When mental health services are cut, the burden doesn't go away but gets picked up by police and hospitals, who aren't properly equipped to handle those challenges. The SFPD and ambulances spend massive amounts of time responding to emergencies involving mentally ill homeless, which limits their ability to respond to other problems.

My question was what is the total cost of Florida's mental hospitals and if that is worth it. Assuming that $100M cut was a 10% cut it means that the total expenditure could be $1B. Which looks ridiculously high for merely 20M population of Florida. Of course there is a whole point of whether government ought to spend some money now to avoid spending on basic services later whether there are proper studies done and i…

Florida's GDP is $748B. Suppose 1 in 300 people in the state are mentally ill enough at a given time to warrant living in a mental hospital. If that costs $1B, about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population. Seems very reasonable to me, without any more specific numbers to go on.

To throw out another number for comparison, medicare and medicaid together cost about $50B / year in the state.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#77

Post by trhway »

will_brown wrote: post #61
astrodust wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most of the state will be part of the ocean within fifty years, but don't worry people, we've slashed services so the budget's balanced and your taxes won't go up." Sometimes you need to spend money to protect against a future where the costs are even higher. The mosquito control initiative could have paid for itself with the sales taxes on that $5.5B in revenue that never happened.

Agreed, but sometimes there is no money to spend, and that's my point...it is purely a budget issue not a political one. When your State budget goes from say $70B down to $60B (including a stimulus package from the federal government) and the state is already $200B in debt where does the money come from? Had the republican (turned independent, turned democrat) governor Crist known saving $5.5M would cost $5.5B he wou…

>Agreed, but sometimes there is no money to spend, and that's my point...it is purely a budget issue not a political one.

not true. Like every action of a politician this one was political too. You can cut 5.5M of mosquito control or, for example, you can release couple hundreds of low level drug offenders or similar. The latter would cost him political career, so he went with the former (which condemned 4000 people to getting the disease).

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#78

Post by civilian »

Keverw wrote: post #74
nameless912 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is an inconsolable bipolar wreck without therapy and medications, go fuck yourself. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about on this topic.

They're probably some real mental illnesses but probably much less than actually listed in the DSM book. I just think the industry is quick to give people pills and the people who write the DSM have financial ties to the industry. 3,000 people a month die because of psychiatry. We don't ever hear about these victims. There was a court case where a psychiatrist testified and was questioned about what tests he ran on t…

> 3,000 people a month die because of psychiatry.

Citation?

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#79

Post by reality_czech »

dalke wrote: post #57
refurb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't reference Mother Jones. It's incredibly biased. Just like every other political issue, mental health, is complicated and there isn't one reason or person for the way things are. Blaming Reagan ignores the dact that new antipsychotics were developed that allowed patients that were previous confinded to institutions to be released to the community. Also, the ACLU along with the supreme court changed the la…

It would be nice to know what that bias might be. For example, "bias towards truth" is different than "bias towards restoring the US to British monarchy." Mother Jones is of course a politically progressive magazine, so there's a bias in the topics they cover. But that sort of bias says nothing about the quality of the coverage. The Economist is also 'incredibly biased' in what it cover, and they do good job of it as…

I have never, ever, seen Mother Jones do "an investigation into things that people on the left or the Democrats wish we wouldn't." Maybe there was a time that they were more extremist than the Democrats, and that's what they are referring to. They are basically Fox News, but on the left. Both Fox and MJ make you less informed than before because they leave out facts and stories that don't fit their preconceived viewpoint. They seldom straight-up lie, but the way they frame the stories and what they leave out gives you a distorted picture.

You have TONS of more reputable news sources to choose from like the Atlantic, New Yorker, NYT, Economist, etc. With MJ you're just reading straight-up propaganda and it's very distasteful.

In the case of mental health, a lot of things would have to happen before we could get those mentally ill people off the streets. And Mother Jones would oppose many of those things. For example, we would have to be able to commit more people to institutions against their will. We would have to make it harder to sue mental health professionals or else the government would be bankrupted. To really get a lot of them back to work, we'd have to lower the minimum wage to the point that businesses were actually willing to pay for their time rather than use a robot or an outsourced Indian. But that's a lot more complex than hurr hurr Regan was teh Satan, so you won't find that discussed by MJ.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#80

Post by Keverw »

civilian wrote: post #78
Keverw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably some real mental illnesses but probably much less than actually listed in the DSM book. I just think the industry is quick to give people pills and the people who write the DSM have financial ties to the industry. 3,000 people a month die because of psychiatry. We don't ever hear about these victims. There was a court case where a psychiatrist testified and was questioned about what tests he ran on t…

> 3,000 people a month die because of psychiatry. Citation?

The CCHR mentions it in their documentary. Also found this in a Google Search http://www.rehabs.com/pro-talk-articles/psychiatric-medicati...

The medicines they prescribe kills more than heroin. And that's not even counting the shock theory. Yes, they still do that... Here's a video I found a while back on the modern day version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L2-B-aluCE

It sucks people on HN down votes people for being the messenger of bad news. and full disclaimer, I am not affiliated with any of these mentioned sites or organizations. I just always had a bad feeling about psychiatry and these people confirm how bad they really are.

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