HELENA — The Montana House on Tuesday endorsed a bill to stop Montana State Hospital officials from releasing homeless mentally ill patients to shelters, sometimes with only their hospital garb and a week’s worth of medication.
Rep. Ellie Hill Smith, D-Missoula, said her bill would end the practice of dumping homeless patients and force health officials to include housing arrangements in their discharge plans from Montana’s only state-run psychiatric hospital in Warm Springs.
“When Warm Springs discharges them, they are often still in their hospital clothes and they are given seven days of medication,” Hill Smith said. “It is, frankly, morally reprehensible and it’s fiscally unsound.”
Some 166 people since 2011 have been discharged from the hospital without a place to live, including 95 over the past two years, according to information provided for the bill by the state Department of Public Health and Human Services.
Not having a stable home environment increases their chances of being readmitted to the hospital, Smith said. Hill Smith, an attorney who previously ran a Missoula homeless shelter, said 386 of the 768 people who were admitted in the hospital last year were returning patients. It was not clear how many of those returning patients were homeless.
Department of Public Health and Human Services spokesman Jon Ebelt did not return a call for comment, but he said in a written statement that the hospital has a team that works toward safe community placements. Planning for the discharge of a patient can begin within 10 days of a patient being admitted to the hospital, he said.
“In reality, there is sometimes a stigma about mentally ill individuals returning to communities that makes placement a challenge,” Ebelt said in the statement.
Health department officials said in a fiscal note accompanying the bill that the state would be forced to pay for temporary housing costs upfront while hospital officials await a determination of whether the patients are eligible for federal aid.
The cost to the state would run more than $150,000 a year, according to the agency’s estimate. Hill disputed that, saying the costs would be lower if hospital officials begin patients’ discharge plans when they are admitted.
The bill also requires health officials not to delay a person’s discharge from the hospital in order to comply, and to provide patients who are headed to temporary housing with information on how to find permanent housing.
The measure is supported by Disability Rights Montana, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the Montana Primary Care Association.
NAMI Montana executive director Matt Kuntz said housing is a critical part of recovering from mental illness, though he added that some people who leave the hospital choose to be homeless.
“I don’t know if it’s dumping or if it’s a person’s choice,” he said. “But whether it’s dumping or just setting someone up to fail, the end result is the same.”
The House approved the bill 88-12 after a brief discussion in which nobody spoke against the measure. It must pass a final vote before it goes to the Senate for consideration.