WASHINGTON – Bipartisan legislation to improve care of patients with serious mental illness is just a pen stroke from passage, now that the 21st Century Cures Act is headed for the President’s desk.
While the mental health care reform provisions in the legislation (H.R. 34) will impact mental health services broadly, the bulk of the reform language comes from H.R. 2646, a bill sponsored by Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Penn.), which was intended to reverse decades of fragmented – and at times nonexistent – care for persons with serious mental illness.
Rep. Tim Murphy
The legislation calls for the expanded use of assisted outpatient treatment, federal guidance on how states can be reimbursed for offering inpatient psychiatric services, better data collection on mental health services paid for with state and federal dollars, new oversight of the federal agency in charge of mental health, and clarification of HIPAA laws, among other provisions.
“This is big,” Rep. Murphy said at a press conference Dec. 5. “After all the tears and suffering … know that those times when you felt no one was willing to listen, and you were ready to give up, now there is hope.”
Treatment vs. incarceration
Currently, states and communities can draw from $80 million dollars in federal grants for assisted outpatient treatment for patients with serious mental illness. The new legislation adds another $20 million and extends availability of the funding until 2022. It also allows state criminal justice systems to use assisted outpatient treatment grants to treat convicted criminals with serious mental illness instead of incarcerating them.
“[In prison], their illness gets worse, not better, creating a turnstile through which they will return time and again through our criminal justice system,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R.-Tex.) said during the press conference.
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Sen. John Cornyn
Paying for inpatient psychiatric care
The Cures Act also strengthens momentum for overhauling the Medicaid Institutions of Mental Diseases (IMD) exclusion, long a focus of mental health care advocates who view it as a governor on the number of psychiatric beds available nationally.
The exclusion prohibits any medical facility with more than 16 beds from using federal funds to pay for inpatient mental health care for adults under age 65 years. The Cures Act requires the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to offer guidance on how states can use Medicaid demonstration projects to provide innovative inpatient psychiatric services using these waivers.
This follows an April 2016 CMS final rule that matches state funding dollar-per-dollar for up to 15 days of inpatient psychiatric treatment given to Medicaid managed care patients.
Although Rep. Murphy’s original bill called for abolishing the exclusion, he and other advocates are not disappointed in the progress made so far. “We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we needed everything we got,” he said.
“That 15 days was a massive win,” Frankie Berger, advocacy director of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., said in an interview. “Now we have this legislation that requires CMS to tell state Medicaid directors what their wiggle room is when solving the problem on how to get care to these patients. If you read between the lines, this is care that is going to be provided by an IMD.”
The legislation also calls for more data collection and evaluation of IMDs, something that until now has been missing, Ms. Berger said. “A lot of us who work on this issue have found there is absolutely no data on where IMDs are, or who the folks are that are getting treatment in them. We need that information to make good choices,” she said.
“I think we will find savings as we expand the number of psychiatric beds … [and persons with serious mental illness] do not end up in jail cells, homeless, or in the morgue,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said at the press conference. He predicted that for each additional psychiatric bed introduced, savings would amount to between $30,000 and $50,000.
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Sen. Bill Cassidy
Restructuring, clarifying
The Cures Act reforms also restructure the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, putting it under the authority of a new assistant secretary of Health and Human Services and giving it a chief medical officer. The law calls for the new CMO to have “real-world” experience treating patients with serious mental illness. The reformed SAMHSA will have responsibility for centralizing data collection to be used in creating best practices in mental health care. These reforms are particular victories for Rep. Murphy who has railed against the agency for years, citing its lack of medically trained leadership and lack of evidence-based approaches to care.