Health program at risk - The homeless mentally ill could lose out due to a $3-billion budget gap.
A nationally lauded program that has helped thousands of mentally ill homeless men and women break the cycle of psychiatric hospitalization, jail time and street life is now on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's list of budget cuts.
The governor has proposed eliminating Integrated Services for Homeless Adults With Serious Mental Illness, which receives $55 million annually, as part of his attempt to close a budget gap estimated at more than $3 billion.
Mental health advocates, clients and concerned legislators are lobbying fiercely to save the program, which served as the blueprint for California's ongoing efforts to radically retool the state's mental health system.
They have pledged to sue the administration if they fail, contending that the cut would violate the 2004 voter-approved Proposition 63, which aimed to remake the state's mental health system in the image of the homeless program's "whatever it takes" style of treatment, and prohibits the state from reducing mental health funding below its commitment at the time the measure passed.
Proposition 63 channels funds from a 1% income tax on Californians earning more than $1 million a year to mental health care and will ultimately bring billions of dollars into a starved system. But advocates fear that the gains will be neutralized if successful existing programs are cut with the other hand.
"If we don't succeed" in stopping the cut, "it sends a signal to the state government and county governments that they can do similar things," said state Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), an author of the legislation that created the homeless program and Proposition 63.
If the program is eliminated in the coming days or weeks, as many as 4,700 men and women could face a return to homelessness, advocates say.
The proposed cut comes three years after Schwarzenegger praised the program in his budget for creating "significant savings at the local level." In the eight years since it was instituted, it has substantially reduced costly hospitalization and jail time for participants, while increasing the number of days they are able to work.
Among them are people like Karen Balsamico. For most of a decade, Balsamico bounced around the streets, homeless shelters and hospitals of San Rafael and San Francisco, tormented by schizophrenia and weakened by heart disease and diabetes.
