Mental Health Care In San Francisco: Compromise Reached

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — An agreement has been reached between San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Supervisors Matt Haney and Hillary Ronen over a plan to reform the city's mental health care system.

The trio announced the agreement on Tuesday outside of City Hall, following months of negotiations on ways to overhaul the city's treatment of people grappling with homelessness, mental health and substance abuse issues.

Last month, Breed announced she was backing her own comprehensive health care plan for some 4,000 homeless San Franciscans suffering from mental illness, called UrgentCareSF. She also announced she had placed a ballot initiative to pass the plan on the March 2020 ballot.

Similarly, Ronen and Haney announced last month they had placed their plan Mental Health SF on the March 2020 ballot to compete with UrgentCareSF.

Mental Health SF aims to provide mental health services and substance abuse treatment for people who are homeless, uninsured or on Medi-Cal or Healthy San Francisco. The program would include a 24-hour drop-in center with access to psychiatrists and medication for anyone who
needs it, regardless of their insurance.

"I am so excited for the future of mental health in San Francisco because I know this is the right way to do it," Breed said. "We have to start looking at mental health in a whole other way than we did in the past.

"What happens when someone is a schizophrenic? What happens when someone develops dementia or all these other things? What are we doing to make sure we are helping these people and meeting them where they are? This is where we need to go as a city," she said.

"We did and came together," Ronen said. "We just created the first universal mental health and substance use system in the country!"

"We're no longer going to waste money, time and the goodwill of patients, and the rest of us quite frankly, by watching people cycle from the street to emergency services, to residential treatment and then right back out on the street, where it is almost impossible to get better," she said.

"There are so many people in our community, many who live on the streets, and some who are suffering quietly who are not receiving the care they need," Haney said. "But we aren't doing enough right now to actualize the fact that mental health care should be treated as a right by our city."

Although Mental Health SF will move forward, the mayor's office said some changes have been made to the plan, including prioritizing homeless patients. Additionally, instead of building a new facility for the 24-hour drop-in center, the center will instead be located at the existing Behavioral Health Access Center on Howard Street.

Also, as part of the changes to the plan, rather than having the city pay for health services, the city will create an Office of Private Insurance Accountability to advocate for insured people with mental illness to make sure they receive the care they're entitled to legally, according to the mayor's office. — Bay City News