State Senator Mary Jo Wilhelm predicts Iowa's mental health system will be changed

State Senator Mary Jo Wilhelm of Cresco says Republican and Democratic legislators are working together to develop a statewide mental health system that is regionally administered and locally delivered.
 
The current system uses administrators in each of Iowa's 99 counties.  Wilhelm says legislators prefer a regional system.

Says Wilhelm, "Over the last several months, a legislative study committee heard testimony from several work groups, held hours of discussion and reviewed 170 pages of findings."

She says legislators are studying the committee's recommendations:

1. Create up to 15 regions to manage mental health services, instead of 99 individual counties. The counties will organize the regions.
2. The state will take over funding county Medicaid costs.
3. Continue local contributing financial effort. No decisions were made on how local funds will be collected.
4. Require core services to be provided in all regions.
5. Eliminate legal settlement.
6. Standardize eligibility statewide.
7. Incorporate multi-level and co-occurring disabilities in the redesign.
8. Require crisis intervention and prevention along with peer-to-peer support as core services in each region.
9. Create meaningful consumer-centered quality-of-life outcome measures.
10. Provide better coordination between the Department of Human Services and the judicial system on issues such as pre-commitment screening and jail diversion.

Wilhelm says a joint House and Senate committee will meet weekly to work out the details of proposed legislation, including how to pay for implementing the new system in an efficient way over the next five years.