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.
Check out the West Oakland BART stop for a good example. There is an ambulance there nearly every day for several hours dealing with the same mentally ill addicted woman. Imagine what it costs to tie up a couple cop cars, an ambulance, and a full ambulance crew. Plus the ER services.
Now compare that to the cost of dealing properly with one mentally ill person.
Cutting mental health services doesn't save us money; it magnifies both the root problem, and the costs.
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 if people agree to it and if the mental hospitals are free for everyone. But that was not my question here.
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.
Assuming your numbers government spends $15k for every 1 of those 300 people. That number seems pretty high.
The Tampa Bay investigation's violence refers to violence in the hospitals itself and not the general violence in society. For 13.5K per year you might reduce the hospital staff by 10% but that is unlikely to result into chaos that the report seems to suggest.
> about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population
Your math only works if mentally ill people receive no other services from the state whatsoever. Assuming the mental hospitals receive supplies by road, this is not true.
Ok, sure, you can add in roads and it will change the numbers in a small way that will be irrelevant to the thread. You can spend an infinite amount of time making rough estimates more accurate, if that's what you're into.
No I think it's very relevant to the thread. You have not accounted for any other services that people receiving mental health care receive from the state at all. You're ignoring most of the state's spending. Your estimate is not just rough; it can't possibly be anywhere near the mark.
The article states that, at its highest, the annual expenditure was about 420M, so this is nearly a 25% cut in spending. Florida also ranks 49th in spending for mental health services [1], spending less than 1/3 annually per person than the average state. They also have the third highest percentage of mentally ill and uninsured people in the country.
To put this in perspective, Florida spent over $2.2B on its corrections system in 2014 [2].
