Congress can’t be trusted to “repeal and, sometime later, replace” Obamacare. If a person wanting to borrow money says, “I’ll repay you next month,” a prudent lender considers the borrower’s track record of honoring such commitments.

The United States once had a network of large hospitals for the mentally ill such as the state hospital in Augusta. By the early 1960s, medicines had been developed to let many people with chronic, serious mental illness live normal lives.

A national consensus ensued that these large, virtual prisons for the mentally ill should be closed and replaced by a robust system of community mental health centers to help chronically mentally ill people get the care and medication they needed to live normal lives with their families. Congress passed the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963.

State hospitals closed, but Congress got involved in Vietnam and the Kennedy/Johnson succession. Congress underfunded and forgot mental health. Jails and prisons replaced state mental hospitals, with little care for less obviously disturbed people. Now, we are paying a part of the bill in the form of lots of homeless people and mass shootings.

Building, funding and maintaining a community-based system of mental health care would be easy compared to overhauling our health care finances. So, will Congress, given a few more months or years, solve a problem that has stymied it for so long? Will it replace “Obamacare”? The record says, “No.”

Wayne Myers

Waldoboro

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