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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MP43" data-source="post: 3730341" data-attributes="member: 1631">"Yeah, Reagan cut back funding for mental illness around 1981. That and the war on drugs with out substance abuse treatment swelled our prison system." The idea that homelessness is largely the fault of Reagan and heartless Republicans cutting mental health funding is a myth the Left has created to cover its own culpability. Truth is, the big driver of our current situation was the passage of the Medicaid Act way back in 1965. (Pushed through by LBJ and two Democrat-controlled branches of Congress.) The Medicaid Act incentivized States to move patients out of mental hospitals and into nursing homes and residential settings because the program excluded coverage for people in “institutions for mental diseases.”Movies like "One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" and a few scattered but very highly publicized incidents of maltreatment of institutionalized patients, combined with lawsuits by presumably well-intentioned but naive activists demanding that the mentally ill be "mainstreamed" forced the closure of most remaining in-patient mental health facilities over the next decade and a half, and their residents into communities where they typically struggled in the less regulated environment, were far more vulnerable to being preyed upon by the greedy and unscrupulous, and faced much greater exposure to illicit drugs. Plus, providing housing, meals, counseling, medical care, etc., in scattered residential settings drove costs to explode as compared to providing institutionalized care. Yes, Reagan signed a bill that reducing Federal MH funding by 30% in 1981. But the system virtually guaranteeing that the seriously mentally ill would wind up as either criminals or their victims was already in place. Homelessness and incarcerations increased as much or more in States that fully replaced the share of former Federal mental health funding as in those that did so to lesser degrees. The blame Reagan trope is just a way for liberals to avoid facing the consequences of their own well-intentioned but soft-headed policies.</blockquote>

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