Mr. Nance is exactly correct. Oregon faces similar cuts. Now, more than ever it is time to recognize the cost benefit for treatment and prevention services. The exponential rise in public costs for child welfare, foster care, corrections, and incarceration could be diminished significantly if policy makers invested in preventing and treating this disease.

Yeah and.... This treatment crap is rediculous. The treatment is supposed to be just that, Start treatment, get off treatment! No maintenance programs. That is just so these methadone clinics make millions. They have no right puting some of the patients on any kind of maitenance program. That's what family doctors are for, they can help with the 3 days of withdrawal from pain killers, even heroin! There is no need for the methadone clinics, they steal money by getting these incompetant patients hooked on their drug! Heroin addicts are better off going to a weekend detox, then meetings. Welfare should be worried about helping the single mothers and families that are trying to help themselves, because that is what welfare is for, not paying for a weekly fix! I don't think so. These Methadone treatment/clinics should pay for every single patient's rehab and detox so they can overcome the addiction to methadone, then the patients will be clean, if they choose the streats and prison, so be it.

The State of Georgia is cutting treatment funding also. But they have decided to completely cut out funding methadone treatment! The rest of treatment is only getting cut by 7%.

I have collected data from the local trauma center hospital, county corrections, and state psychiatric facilities on admissions since NC started "mental health care reform" in 2002. The effect of these reforms has been to limit access to outpatient care and reduce allowed time inpatient to a useless short period (avg. 7 days for psychiatric and 15 days for addiction). ER presentations that receive a DSM diagnosis increased by 220% over 5 years and an 80% increase in daily census at corrections in spite of adding extensive electronic monitoring for low risk arrestees. As the head of the ER said, when I showed him the data, these people are time consuming to deal with and have low remuneration: i.e. the county tax payer eats the bill. Basically, reform fobbed costs off of the state and onto the counties. If your state is one making massive cuts to mental health/addiction services, be prepared for large increased costs at the ER and the jail. Put simply, if you deny access to care, the mentally ill and addicted will survive on the streets as best they can until they end up in the ER or jail. Costs that will far exceed the money saved, but that is a county problem and a personal problem if it is your car or house broken into, but the state does not care.