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November 7, 2019
Contact: Byron Johnson, Communications Director
(703) 294-6001
[email protected]
Treatment Advocacy Center Celebrates Groundbreaking CMS Announcement Expanding Access
to Mental Illness Care
First-of-its-kind waiver blunts decades-old discriminatory Medicaid policy that
spurred nationwide bed shortage crisis
Arlington, VA - The Treatment Advocacy Center celebrated the beginning of the end
of discriminatory federal policy yesterday, following a landmark announcement by
the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
CMS announced that the District of Columbia has been granted a "first-of-its-kind"
waiver of the IMD exclusion, a decades-old federal law that hinders states' ability
to provide hospital care for mental illness. With their waiver approved, DC may
now seek Medicaid reimbursement for care provided in certain mental health facilities
defined as "institutions for mental disease."
The Treatment Advocacy Center's #aBedInstead [[link removed]]
campaign highlights how disastrous the IMD exclusion has been for individuals in
psychiatric crisis.
"For decades, the IMD exclusion has stood in the way of desperately-needed hospital
care for people with mental illness, forcing them into our jails, emergency rooms
and streets," said
John Snook, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center. "This federally
sanctioned discrimination against people with mental illness is medically, legally
and morally indefensible. DC's waiver will avert tragedy, promote recovery and point
the way forward for a nation that has abandoned its most vulnerable citizens."
HHS Secretary Alex Azar echoed these sentiments in the CMS comment yesterday, stating,
"For too long, our system has failed to provide Americans with serious mental illness
and their families the treatment and assistance that they need."
The Treatment Advocacy Center's 2016 report Going, Going, Gone [[link removed]]
found that the IMD exclusion catalyzed the elimination of treatment beds nationally,
resulting in a mental health system with fewer state hospital beds per capita than
at any time since the 1850's, when the need for medical treatment of mental illness
was first recognized. The report detailed a host of consequences of this bed shortage,
including near-universal "boarding" of psychiatric patients in hospital emergency
rooms, widespread waiting lists for hospital admission from jails and prisons and
pending or threatened civil rights litigation in numerous states.
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The Treatment Advocacy Center [[link removed]]
is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating barriers to the timely
and effective treatment of severe mental illness. The organization promotes laws,
policies and practices for the delivery of psychiatric care and supports the development
of innovative treatments for, and research into the causes of severe and persistent
psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
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