Addiction treatment may be worst hit by State budget
At the September 1 County Commissioners Work Session, Rick Kastner, executive director of Lancaster’s Drug and Alcohol Commission (DAC), told the Commissioners that, under budget cuts currently being proposed in Harrisburg, the drug and alcohol field would be the most impacted of all human services.
Kastner came to the Tuesday Work Session to submit seven contracts—most of which were standard service renewals. However, a question from Commissioner Scott Martin shifted the discussion from basic housekeeping to the ever expanding impact of the State budget impasse. Martin asked Kastner whether the DAC had yet received any State funding for treatment services. Kastner replied, “No, we do not have an allocation….We have our contracts in place, but we’re not paying any of our providers.”
Kastner further elaborated that the only lifeline currently supporting treatment services in Pennsylvania right now is funding from the HealthChoices program, which facilitates drug and alcohol services through Medicaid:
“The only reason why I believe that most of the D&A [Drug and Alcohol] and Mental Health programs are still surviving is that, luckily, the HealthChoices money is still flowing. So, if a clinic has two-thirds of their money coming from HealthChoices and a third of it coming from County Funding—from MHMR or Drug and Alcohol Commission—they usually can survive for at least a few more months. But if HealthChoices funding didn’t continue to flow, we would have had dozens of facilities in Lancaster and elsewhere closing.”
According to Kastner, even in spite of this sustained channel of funding, some Drug and Alcohol Commissions in the state have already come into “desperate situations,” losing cash-flow and laying off employees. Kastner said that a statewide shut-down of human service systems has only been averted thus far because providers have been pulling lines of credit and relying upon HealthChoices funding. “And, as time goes on without a State budget,” Kastner warned, “You’re going to see more and more of a disaster.”
Unfortunately for the Drug and Alcohol Commission, the passage of a State Budget would not necessarily be the end of their fiscal troubles. Kastner recounted a recent meeting with Estelle Richman, the State Secretary of Welfare. When asked which human service system would be most impacted by the cuts proposed in the Republican-backed Senate Bill 850, Richman identified the drug and alcohol field.
Mary Quinn, Assistant Director for the Pennsylvania Association of County Drug and Alcohol Administrators, also present at the Work Session, explained that, as opposed to human services like Children and Youth and Mental Health, D&A treatment is not a State mandated service. This, in large measure, accounts for the potential drop in funding.
Commissioner Martin asserted that, although D&A treatment is not mandated, many other mandated services are indirectly dependent upon its stabilizing effects:
“I think it’s pretty much an accepted fact that if you don’t press these problems on the front end when people are having these issues,…you’re going to be paying even more in the Children and Youth system when you’re having kids beaten, or in Domestic Relations, or, more importantly, the Criminal Justice System with court costs and imprisonment.”
Sometimes you need to be strict with children, but that doesn’t mean you should hit them. Being strict and hitting children are two different things.
What hitting does is makes the child more stubborn. Many a times, we hit a child not because of his fault but because we are frustrated about something else in our life. That is very unfair. Would we have liked something similar to be done to us when we were a child?
Even if we have gone through it in our childhood, it does not give us any reason to do the same to the little budding flowers. Keep calm, give them love and they will be just fine and listen to you even more.