Four months after a program for severely mentally ill people was defunded in Idaho, the state’s Legislature moved to spend about $10 million in state opioid and tobacco settlement funds to temporarily reinstate the assertive community treatment, or ACT, program along with peer support.
For decades, ACT provided comprehensive support for Idahoans with severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, before it was defunded in December. Following those cuts, four patients who were on the program died.
The bill, which garnered broad bipartisan support from legislators, funds the programs through June 2027.
Sara Bennett, owner of Riverside Recovery in Lewiston, runs the regional ACT team. She said she’s glad to return to that work and bring back staff members whose positions were cut. But the one-year payout leaves future plans uncertain.
“There's most definitely staff caution about coming back to a program that doesn't have a guarantee to be going after June of next year,” she said.
Advocates for reinstating ACT have said that funding the program, which costs about $4 million annually to run, is far less expensive than the alternative — having patients cycle in and out of emergency rooms and jails.
That sentiment was shared by House Appropriations chair Rep. Josh Tanner, R-Eagle, during an April 1. House session.
“Even though this is an increase, this really is a decreased cost driver overall for the state,” Tanner said. “If these programs are not in place, we will see a significant increase in a supplemental (budget) this next year.”
Rep. Ben Fuhriman, R-Shelley, was one of the legislators who first pushed to bring ACT back. He said that, in addition to the cost of losing the program, early warnings from law enforcement caught his attention.
“When a sheriff takes the time to get a bunch of legislators together and say, 'This is going to be detrimental to our communities,’ I listen,” Fuhriman said.
Lewiston Police Capt. Jeff Klone said ACT is an important resource.
For police, Klone said, the options outside of ACT are to transport a patient to a hospital or arrest them if they’re breaking a law. Both take time, he said, and do little to prevent the same problem down the road.
“If somebody's having a crisis, we might get called on 'em 10, 12, 15 times a day,” Klone said. “ Getting them the long-term assistance they need allows our officers to focus on other things.”
Clinics that administer ACT say they’re currently working with the state’s Medicaid administrator, Magellan, to try and bring the program back. Those clinics are also having to rehire specialists who lost their jobs in December.
“We were interviewing over the weekend for RNs,” said Ric Boyce, a clinician who administers the ACT team in Pocatello. “Our nurse practitioners are gonna be stepping in and helping cover until we have an RN in place.”
Laura Scuri co-owns Access Behavioral Health Services, which administers ACT in the Boise area. She said providers will need to reconnect with some patients who did not maintain contact after ACT was defunded.
“There's clients that just have — they're in the wind,” she said.
Bennett said her clinic lost contact with about 12 patients since December.
“ Some of them are homeless or are harder to track down,” she said. “So, we have to do a little bit of work on that end.”
Boyce said reinstating ACT is a heavy lift, but he hopes increased awareness of the program will spur the Legislature to find long-term funding next year.
“I think there's a lot more security,” he said. “There is so much more awareness now than there ever was.”
Fuhriman had written an earlier bill that would have provided long-term funding, but it didn’t gain the necessary support this session.
“It's just a priority issue to me that we have chosen as a Legislature not to care about mental health issues in our state, because we want to say that the budget is out of control, that the state and the government is spending too much,” he said. “But who is going to pay to make sure that these people are treated and taken care of properly?”
He said long-term funding could depend on legislative priorities following this year’s elections.
