Leave the Therapy to Us

(Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Mrs JP.)

     It could've been worse: Nevada could've put its mental patients under the bus instead of on it. But that's about the only good thing that can be said about the biggest health care scandal to hit Nevada in decades, if not ever.
     Luckily for these 1500 mentally ill patients that have been shipped out of Nevada and foisted off on other states since 2008 (which comes out to almost one a day), the Sacramento Bee and their staff writer Cynthia Hubert has been all over this story for the last two months. It's reached up to Gov. Brian Sandoval's office who could no longer stonewall the press as it notoriously has done since the Republican Sandoval (hereafter referred to as Mexican Mitt) and his flaks have done from Day One.
     Let's all pretend not to notice the feral opportunism showed by Nevada Democrats and their mostly faux outrage as they use their mentally ill to score brownie points as Sandoval gears up for re-election. After all, if they really took to heart Reagan's and Nixon's idea for local clinics, they would've done something about it in the last several decades. But they haven't.
     This is simply disgusting. Instead of caring for these poor people tormented by mental and emotional turmoil, Sandoval's pretending this scandal doesn't exist, his chief mental health officer is using weasel words like "policy variations" and trying to pretend this is the exception and not the rule and that James Brown is an anomaly.
     They put this poor guy on a bus to Sacramento with no one there at the other end waiting for him, no followup treatment plan put in place and no lodgings set up for him. He had thrust into his hands three days worth of medication, a few containers of Ensure and some cheese crackers before shoving him on a bus that would have 11 stops over a 15 hour journey.
     Nevada's own policy of doing this many, many hundreds of times just in the last five years is part of the austerity budgets we've been seeing all over the country The constant warfare abroad and near-constant tax cuts for the rich have inevitably led to a severe curtailment of social services for the indigent and handicapped (Which, if it wasn't done by design, is surely the most incredible case of serendipity in human history). And putting on buses without meals and often without followup care the mentally ill is nakedly a way to save money (The official policy in Nevada even tries to claim Ensure is better for their former patients than bulk sustenance and at one point even uses the phrase "burden of care.").
     It's obvious that no one really gives two shits for these poor people, including Nevada Democrats who are using them as a cudgel with which to beat Sandoval over his well-coiffed head. If Democrats in Nevada and elsewhere really wanted to do something about this, they wouldn't've let the unnecessary chainsaw of austerity cut into mental health services.
     But Sandoval acting as if this isn't a scandal at all and visibly wishing the whole thing would just go away is just as heinous, if not moreso. Shipping indigent and homeless mental patients and just dumping them off in another state (Brown was even told by a psychiatrist to call 911 in Sacramento on his arrival) is simply bottomlessly despicable. Merely on the basis of this mental health scandal, the Jekyl and Hyde Sandoval and his heartless non-reaction ought to be made a one-term governor