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(2-26-21) A conservative think tank has joined a growing national chorus calling for an end of a federal rule that discourages states from building psychiatric hospitals and providing long-term, in-patient care for the seriously mentally ill.
The Manhattan Institute argues in a new report released this week that the Medicaid’s IMD Exclusion rule has outlived its usefulness and should be repealed.
President Trump’s President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice and the Interdepartmental Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee created by the Obama Administration also have called for dropping the rule.
What is the IMD Exclusion and why should you care?
It’s a rule that has been around since 1965 that discourages states from building and supporting large psychiatric hospitals and pushes them instead to provide community based treatment. The so-called “16 bed rule” accomplishes this by denying states Medicaid reimbursement for adults between the ages of 22-to-64 if they are treated in psychiatric hospitals and other facilities which have more than 16 beds. States must pay 100 percent of the cost of care for the seriously ill in most long-term psychiatric hospitals, compared to 50 percent for those treated in the community.
The new report’s authors, Stephen Eide and Carolyn D. Gorman, provide a thoughtful argument in favor of dumping the rule.
Reporter Ben Finley, writing in the 
