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Mental health needs strong support now

Published 9:00 pm Friday, September 21, 2001

Jess C. Jamieson, Ph.D.

I read Robert Diaz’s letter on Sept. 19 ("Mental health: Advocacy lost for struggling patients") with compassion and frustration. As the President of Compass Health, the non-profit mental health provider that must stop helping Mr. Diaz because of complications in mental health funding, I remain distressed over the funding inequities for the care of people with mental illness.

You’ve probably driven around Snohomish County and seen Compass Health signs all over the place, wondering who we are and what we do. We are a non-profit organization with 500 employees throughout the county in 26 locations. Our psychiatrists, counselors and nurses provide office visits, house calls, school-based counseling and residential treatment centers for you and your neighbors. In fact, statistically, one in five of The Herald’s readers will have some form of mental illness at some point in their lives, and it’s Compass Health who’s here to help them with it. We treated 12,000 of your Snohomish County neighbors last year alone — children, adults, and seniors — providing counseling in 13 native languages.

With so many people needing mental health care it’s hard to understand why the funding is so far below the rest of the medical system. Here’s how it works:

  • People in well-paying jobs generally have corporate medical plans such as HMOs, PPOs and the like that cover, on a limited basis, mental health care. Compass receives 10 to 15 percent of our revenue from them.

  • People with no income have the most comprehensive mental health insurance available in the form of Medicaid. Most of Compass Health’s revenue (about 75 percent) comes from state and federal Medicaid dollars. There are restrictions on who qualifies for this insurance, and those restrictions are getting more stringent all the time.

  • Individuals in the middle — the working poor in our county — are the ones who fall through gaps in our mental health care safety net. These are people who do not meet Medicaid criteria, or who pay for only part of their services, such as through a sliding-fee scale. Fortunately, we are able to treat many through revenue gained through charitable grants and donations. Large employers in Snohomish County help greatly, including the City of Everett and Snohomish County, who have consistently provided grants to Compass Health over the decades we’ve served you — either as Compass Health or as Luther Child Center. We receive about 10 to 15 percent of our funding from grants and donations, including those from United Way. While we’re thankful for them, these grants and donations are insufficient to meet our county’s growing mental health care needs.

    It’s because of these growing gaps and limits in how we can apply Medicaid funding that Mr. Diaz now finds himself without mental health care.

    Please know that we at Compass Health remain committed to helping as many people as we can.

    There is something you can do. Urge our legislators to provide adequate funding in the mental health system for those who have minimal resources.

    And, consider helping us with one more source of funding, which now amounts to less than 1 percent of our revenue. Consider donating to Compass Health. Your contribution will help your neighbors and our entire community.

    With the grief and anxiety generated by terrorist attacks on our country and the resulting economic turmoil caused here, the need for mental health care is only increasing. We all need to pull together for mental health’s sake.

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