The Corporate Mainstream Media is the BuzzFlash Media Putz of the Week for Its Coverage of Haiti as a "Spectacle"

In the 1960's, this country was his hit by a distaster of man-made proportions and we have been feeling the aftershocks ever since.  There is no media coverage of this disaster, we are not bombarded with 800 numbers, text numbers and telethons to help the victims of this disaster. 

Instead, we step over them on a daily basis. They make up a third of our homeless population, they clog our emergency rooms and have turned our largest prisons into psychiatric institutions. The only media coverage I see is when a person committs a violent act while in a psychotic state.

In the 1960's when Medicaid was enacted, one group of citizens were singled out as ineligible, based on where they were treated.  This was actually written into law and is called the IMD Exclusion, standing for Institutes of Mental Disease.  No Medicaid reiumbursement is allowed to a long-term care facility, larger than 16 beds, whose primary type of patient is one who has a mental illness.  The only type of institution that met this description and whose patients would otherwise qualify for Medicaid were state psychiatric hospitals.  This was essentially singling out one group of people to deny coverage.  This is federally sanctioned discrimination and should be repealed.

The states, with their own budget woes, came up with a plan to set up community mental health systems.  Aided by the improvement of anti-psychotic medications and a backlash against institutions, the public went along with it.  This way, Medicaid had to pay their former patient's care. But they went too far by releasing the sickest of the sick; the ones who no drug or behavioral therapy can reach.  I know because my brother Paul was one of them.

He was lucky, he was never incarcerated or homeless, but his life was very difficult, to say the least.  He went without food for weeks, he had psychotic episodes that could have endangered himself and others, his hygiene was so bad that he got infections in his feet and toenails.  We could not put him on the patch because he would smoke anway.  He cycled in and out of the local hospital psych wards. He died of lung cancer at the age of 48, yet I call him one of the lucky ones.

We would never release an Alzheimer's patient from a nursing home, expect them to "take care of themselves" and cook their own food, buy their own groceries and manager their own medications and treatment plan, but we did just that to the sickest of our schizophrenic patients. 

A flood of former patients were released into the communities and many were ill equiped to manage the maze of rules and regulations let alone perform the daily tasks needed to keep them alive.  The torrent of people kept coming over the decades until we have the staggering numbers of homeless and prison populations with severe mental illness to which we seem oblivious today.  There is absolutely no media coverage of this disaster. 

Please contact your US Representatives and urge them to support H.R. 619 to end this discrimination and repeal the IMD Exclusion.