Reagan's other side - or liberals' sneaky side?

Reagan's other side - Bill Bell, Whittier Daily News

argument excerpt: "So as not to trust my sometimes faulty memory, I went to the Internet and purely at random came up with these words by Cassi Feldman: "California's desperate shortage of psychiatric facilities dates back to the late 1960s when then-governor Ronald Reagan slashed 1,700 hospital staff positions and several state-operated aftercare facilities ... (now) while applicants wait in line (police are) cracking down on the mentally ill.' And physician Dr. Tod H. Mikuriya wrote not too long ago a paper on the "Breakdown of American Healthcare:' The breakdown of America's health care system began in the '60s with the rise of Republicans led by Gov. Ronald Reagan, who presided over the emptying of California mental hospitals under the guise of community psychiatry.' He went on to say, "The poisonous dogma of deregulation and privatization allowed corruption and altering government policy to suit special-interest groups that crafted self-serving regulatory policy.'"


Reagan Inspired Generation Of Youth - Jennifer Nelson
counter-argument excerpt : One of the fallacies liberals like to foster about Reagan is that our homeless mentally ill population is his fault. One Bay Area news report Saturday night presented this charge as fact during a story about Reagan's death and legacy.

In 1963, Kennedy signed legislation that created a national movement aimed at closing mental-health institutions and moving patients to community-care facilities and general hospitals with psychiatric wards. A few years later, Congress created a new program that provided funds for community-based nonprofit organizations to provide services to the nation's mentally ill population. Reagan was governor as these changes were being implemented at the state level. Later, when Reagan was president, he opposed continuing federal government-run mental-health programs. Instead, during his two terms as president, he signed several pieces of legislation that created block grants, giving the states more flexibility in how they spent federal dollars meant to help the mentally ill, and developed rules for the protection and advocacy of population.

Reagan also signed legislation creating the Stuart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act to help states provide housing to homeless mentally ill people. For him, a former governor, federalism -- limiting the federal government's authority in favor of state's rights -- was a major priority during his presidency. He aimed to give the states the flexibility they needed to tailor state programs to fit the needs of their mentally ill.

For the past four decades, as a nation, we've moved beyond simply institutionalizing people with mentally illnesses, but we've not been successful in creating an alternative care system. A large number of policymakers at both the state and federal levels share the responsibility for that failure. It is simply unfair to lay the blame entirely at Reagan's feet, as his critics routinely do.



Bill Bell borrows "randomly" from Cassi Feldman, another liberal columnist, the SF Gate article I googled on the internet was from Dec 2000. And apparently the Bay Area specializes in this because a little more "random" searching finds a potent counter-argument from one, Jennifer Nelson, who also posts on SF Gate (San Francisco Chronicle) who dislikes the little aside by a news report that Reagan pushed thousands of mentally ill on the street.

I'm not sure if either one has the total truth, of course, but for Mr. Bell in So. CA and the SF media to blithely just tell half the story at the time of his death seems a bit crude, but maybe the irony of Alzheimers "made" them do it. Rich irony always beats tastefulness in the news biz.

Certainly how one governors cuts in the sixties caused the downfall of an entire system is a strain on credulity by Mr. Bell. So is the total lack of context to the "community psychiatry" he refers to, where liberal jurisprudence and legislation and mental health philosophy made the patient's rights to avoid detention paramount if he was not threatening others and not acutely suicidal.
Just how do you structure community health care for the homeless - send the psychiatrists and their couches out to the cardboard boxes??

Thank you, Jennifer