Money to Do What It Takes

Through most of 1998 and 1999, Steven Anderson, now 47, lived on the streets of Alkali Flats, a Sacramento neighborhood a 10-minute walk from the Capitol. Beneath old trees that once shaded the homes of governors and prominent businessmen, he scored crack cocaine, pot, methamphetamine and alcohol, trying to medicate himself against his as-yet-undiagnosed major depression and psychosis.

Last month, Anderson returned to Alkali Flats--not to buy drugs but to contribute his insights at Gov. Gray Davis’ Summit on Homelessness, held April 22 at the Alkali Flats Boys and Girls Club. Now a full-time counselor for the mental health program Turning Point, Anderson is a thriving example of the good that California government has done to help indigent people with mental illness and addictions. We hope that hearing his success story spurred lawmakers and the governor to recognize their obvious next move.

Directed to Turning Point after becoming suicidal in November 1999, Anderson was one of the first state residents to have care paid for under AB 34, a bill by Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) that passed that year.

Before Steinberg’s bill, programs to help mentally ill and addicted people living on the streets “siloed” money. Money that someone had decided should go to housing went only to housing, money for medications only to medications and so on, even though that approach doesn’t make a lick of sense to the people who know the most about how to address the complex web of problems that leave people sleeping on sidewalks.

AB 34, on the other hand, embraces an approach informally known as “whatever it takes.” The money it provides can be used for, in Steinberg’s words, “whatever will help the client move from homelessness to hope.”

In most places, unfortunately, this approach is the exception, because it’s still cheaper from a county’s perspective to send a mentally ill person who breaks the law to prison, where the state picks up the tab, than to pay for care that can break the cycle of illness and incarceration, even though AB 34 kicks in money.

In a 15-0 vote Tuesday, the Assembly Health Committee passed a bill, also by Steinberg, that could correct the perverse incentives in the system by permitting the state Department of Mental Health to give more money to any county whose mental health programs reduce the number of people in prisons or using health-care and other stopgap services, thereby cutting total state costs.

It makes sense. The state spends $65million each year on AB 34-funded programs such as Turning Point. But a full analysis of the costs to taxpayers would deduct about $23million in money not spent on prison and hospital costs. Experts also suspect that AB 34 saves tens of millions more when people who have been helped, and maybe even have found jobs, are no longer chronic customers of emergency rooms and emergency shelters.

Economics as well as compassion should inspire legislative leaders to expedite the passage of Steinberg’s new bill, AB 2057. And Davis should sign it, giving counties hard cash incentives to do the right thing.