Gov. Paul LePage made a surprise appearance today before the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee as it was considering his bill that would allow some dangerous patients at the Riverview Psychiatric Hospital to be sent to the intensive mental health unit at Maine State Prison.
He called upon lawmakers to act on the issue before adjourning the session.
LePage says the state is facing serious federal financial penalties, now up to $30 million, for failing to run Riverview according to federal standards. He says it’s time that the state finally deals with its mental health system, which has been plagued with problems since it signed a consent decree in 1990 promising appropriate care.
“We have been kicking the can down the road,” LePage says. “Our county jails are full of people with mental illness and they don’t belong there. And shame on us as elected officials to continue to allow that to happen.”
He says lawmakers should not leave Augusta this year until the issues, and the proposals put forth to solve them, are addressed. They include plans to create an intensive mental health unit at Maine State Prison and to rebuild the Maine Correctional Center in Windham with a major new drug rehabilitation facility.
“The vision is that addicts will be treated, dealers will be incarcerated, it’s that simple,” LePage says. “People who have mental illness in our jails, we’re going to try and get them into this facility, get them stabilized whether it is on medication, therapy treatment, whatever the case may be. The whole goal is to get them back into society.”
The governor says he only foresees a few cases a year in which a patient at Riverview would be transferred to the unit at Maine State Prison. That would only occur when their behavior is a danger to themselves or to others.
The other option would be to send the most difficult patients to an out-of-state facility, but LePage says that’s not the preferred choice, as patients benefit by having family close by.
But Rep. Patricia Hymanson, a Democrat from York, questions the idea of using the prison mental health unit to treat patients who haven’t committed a crime.
“As a physician I see the importance of appropriate treatment for people with mental health issues in an appropriate setting,” she says. “To me the appropriate setting is a hospital setting for people, not a prison.”
And a majority of the committee agreed, voting to reject the bill as proposed by the governor. They are supporting a version of the bill focused on making sure the appropriate hospital level of care be provided, whether at Riverview or Dorothea Dix in Bangor, at a new facility or at an out-of-state facility.
“We agree with what the governor said when he was here, that it really should be a hospital level of care accredited by an organization that accredits hospitals to make sure that the quality is there and that the people are safe,” says Westbrook Democrat Drew Gattine, who co-chairs the committee.
Gattine says the unit at the prison meets correctional standards, not hospital standards. He says his committee is only dealing with part of the overall plan laid out by the governor, the section dealing with Riverview and mental health patients.
“It would be really good to understand the entire package,” Gattine says. “To a certain extent the governor did that better today than I have ever heard anybody from the administration do that, so I appreciated that.”
The Legislature is considering pieces of LePage’s overall vision. Gattine’s committee is looking at the issues surrounding mental health and drug addiction, but other parts of the plan, like the $150 million reconstruction of the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, are before the Criminal Justice Committee.
When the cost of all the various bills is finally figured out, the puzzle of how to pay for it all will go to the Appropriations Committee.
