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 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 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.