In the Daily Star today: Reporter Patricia Breakey pounds the pavement for details on Mike Allen, the 31-year-old Walton man accused of burning down the First Baptist Church on Tuesday morning. Friends and neighbors paint a sad picture of mental illness and drug addiction:
[Susan] Kuebler said Allen worked for her in the past at Papa's Diner.
"He was a good worker, a nice guy, I never would have expected him to do something like this," Kuebler said. "He was a recovering addict who went into rehab two years ago, but I noticed that he had been walking the streets lately looking kind of lost.
"There was just something not mentally right with Mike. He just wasn't stable, but he wasn't violent. I couldn't even believe that he did this."
Kuebler said Allen's girlfriend, Renee, had been in the diner Sunday to see if Kuebler would consider rehiring Allen.
"Renee said Mike was doing fantastic, and they were getting their kids back -- Social Services had taken their kids away," Kuebler said. "But I heard recently that he was drug-seeking again."
In case anyone needed reminding in the wake of the Arizona shootings, mental illness is a serious public health problem: epidemic, under-treated and poorly understood. With New York State currently facing epic budget problems, it's especially critical for the state to get the most out of its public health dollar.
On Sunday, in a New York Times Room For Debate column -- a very cool feature, in which the paper rounds up several experts on a topic and has them all debate the same question -- four talking heads took on the question of how New York should reform its Medicaid mental-health sector. From the introduction:
Mr. Cuomo is not the first governor of New York to vow to fix the state's longstanding Medicaid problems. His strategy is to see if changes made in the program in Wisconsin, where costs were reduced by 10 percent, will work in New York. A particular target for budget cutting and redesign is the coverage of mental health and drug rehabilitation services, a sector with ever rising costs and a history of widespread mismanagement and fraud.
How can New York save money on Medicaid coverage for mental health while safeguarding care for those who need it?
