New Funding For IN Mental Patients

A federal agency approves Indiana’s request to use Medicaid funding to provide expanded services to residents diagnosed with serious mental illnesses. U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services authorized the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration to use those funds to pay for short term care for patients admitted at large institutions for mental disease, rather than continuing to limit treatment to facilities with fewer than 16 beds. The state sought to extend the expanded substance abuse and serious mental illness components of the Healthy Indiana Plan through 2025. The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration says that because about one in four people with mental illness also has a substance abuse problem, the new waiver will ensure consistency in their treatment. State records show only about half of Indiana Medicaid members receiving inpatient psychiatric services between July 1, 2018, and June 30, 2019, obtained them at an institution for mental diseases.