Horror Story in America – Homeless and Mentally Ill in Nevada Bused to California and Just Left There

But It Saves the Taxpayers of Nevada Money!

The latest horror story is not one that is showing at the local cinema.  It is one that is being played out in the  mental hospitals in Nevada and the streets of San Francisco.  It seems the way a mental hospital in Nevada has been dealing with the problem of the homeless and mentally ill is to take them to the bus station, buy them a ticket to California, give them a couple of sandwich and a day’s medication and off they go.

Mr. Theisen is at the center of a class-action lawsuit brought this month by San Francisco’s city attorney, Dennis Herrera, against the State of Nevada on behalf of 24 mentally ill and homeless people. They were all, like Mr. Theisen, bused out of Nevada and left on the streets of San Francisco with little or no medication.

But that is just a small sampling, Mr. Herrera says, of the estimated 1,500 people who were bused all over the country in recent years from the state-operated Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Center in Las Vegas and other Nevada institutions, 500 of them to California.

It is hard to comment on a story like this, and on these details.

Ms. Woods, the spokeswoman for Nevada’s health agency, said that from July 1, 2008, to March 31, the state bought out-of-state bus tickets for 4.7 percent of the patients it discharged, an estimated 1,473 people. “The findings show there were 10 instances in the course of five years where there was not enough documentation to know for certain if staff confirmed there was housing/shelter and supportive services at the destination,” she said.

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, however, said last month that its inquiry showed a more widespread problem. About 40 percent of the mental patients discharged by the hospital went into local homeless shelters or were shipped elsewhere, the federal investigators said, and most of those were sent directly to a Greyhound bus station with a ticket but without proper documentation or instructions on what they should do when they arrive.

And Nevada of course is the playground of the rich and famous.  So it is easy to see that the state doesn’t want mega millionaires play time disturbed by the sight of the homeless and mentally ill.  Easy for all to understand except for the homeless and mentally ill.  They probably don’t get it at all.