Apr 16, 2009
Chicago mental health centers saved by the stimulus
Mulitple Chicago news sources have reported that four area mental health centers have been spared from the chopping block for now with the help of federal stimulus money.
The announcement came last Thursday just days after supporters of the mental health centers in Back of the Yards, Beverly/Morgan Park, Greater Grand/Mid South, and Woodlawn staged a sit-in at Mayor Daley’s office and managed to get a meeting with a top aide.
In an interesting twist, Chi-Town Daily News reporter Alex Parker discovered that the $1.2 million cut in state mental health funding the city attributed the closings to actually came down to a glitch in the city’s new computerized billing system.
It’s a billing system which, Parker reports, has been causing a lot of problems in the year or so since it was installed:
Anselmo told the Daily News that billing data entered by clinical staff is returned by the state’s system, which indicates reports are inaccurate or missing data.
Without the correct data, providers won’t get paid in a timely way…
Providers are frustrated by the system, Value Options, which they say gobbles up information, but doesn’t provide any explanation for the problems.
“Historically, our error rate is relatively low, and the number of rejections are low, and this year (the rejection rate) is higher,” says Tony Kopera, president and CEO of the Community Counseling Centers of Chicago.
He says his organization is waiting on more than $550,000 in payments connected to bills it began submitting in July.
The Chi-Town Daily News has provided some exceptional coverage of the mental health center fiasco. I highly recommend checking their stories out. Also, don’t miss Parkers investigative piece that got to the root of the city’s mental health funding problem.
As a side note, the timing of Parker’s investigative piece and the timing of the mayor’s stimulus funding announcement lead me to suspect that Parker’s story may have played a role in the city’s acquiescence in the matter. If anyone out there can shed light on this, please do! That’s what comments are for.