news-record.com

Gov. Mike Easley said today that the legislature needs to change the way the state's mental health system is managed, calling for more control to be placed with the Department of Health and Human Services.

"This is not a manageable situation," Easley told reporters.

In 2001, the state reworked how it cared for those who needed publicly funded mental health care. Those changes gave local mental health care agencies more control over spending. They also prompted a shift from government-provided mental health care to having services provided by private agencies contracted by state and local governments.

"Essentially what you have is privatization with no accountability," Easley said.

Easley said the legislature needs to give the state more power to remove failing mental health service providers from the system and more authority over the local mental health agencies. Essentially, the changes would re-centralize some powers that had been distributed by the 2001 law.

In addition, Easley said the state would keep more publicly-funded hospital beds open. Although mental health reform was supposed to reduce reliance on state hospitals, they are handling more patients after reform than they were before. And Easley said the state is in the process of renegotiating its Medicaid contract to allow for changes in how private mental health providers are paid.

Over-payments to companies that provide so-called community support services have been a major problem in the system.

Problems in the mental health system have been the focus of media attention for much of the past three years, including of stories in the News & Record. Most recently, the News & Observer of Raleigh published a series on failures in mental health reform efforts.

Tuesday's news conference responded to many of the concerns raised in those reports. However, Easley refused to take or place blame for the failures, saying only that they needed to be fixed.

"I'm surprised these stories didn't run a year ago," Easley said.

Easley is constitutionally barred from running for office again. And the problems in the mental health services have developed over his first seven years in office. When asked if the less than a year left in his term was enough to fix what has gone wrong, Easley said it was.

"Yes sir. If we get the tools we need, we can fix this system," Easley said of the legislative reforms he has proposed.