2012 September 20 |

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20 Sep 2012

Mental health options expanding in Tulsa

The capacity to treat mental health patients in Tulsa will soon grow significantly thanks to a new contract awarded to a public-private partnership, officials announced Thursday.

The contract will increase the number of inpatient beds for psychiatric care in Tulsa, add a crisis stabilization unit and offer a better system of getting the patient to the care that is most appropriate.

Sixteen permanent psychiatric beds will be added, and the crisis center will treat people who may not need a permanent bed but may need a place to stabilize. It will add to the 56 inpatient beds already operating in Tulsa.

Terri White, commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, made the announcement Thursday at the National Zarrow Mental Health Symposium taking place this week at the Tulsa Convention Center.

White said the additional beds will greatly improve the city’s ability to treat patients in a mental health crisis.

“Having good mental health is the key ingredient to making sure we have healthy families, healthy communities and a healthy nation,” White said.

The partnership between Family Children’s Services, Hillcrest Medical Center and Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health hopes to have the services in place by January.

It is one of two new crisis centers that officials plan to open in the state. The department’s contract, paid by state funds, will open a second unit in Ardmore.

“Untreated mental illness and addiction costs our state far too much, not only in terms of how it affects the individual, but also the costs borne by Oklahoma communities to deal with the resulting negative consequences such as overcrowded emergency rooms, increased need for law enforcement intervention and rising incarceration rates,” said Gov. Mary Fallin in a statement.

“By working with communities to provide these services, we save lives and tax dollars.”

One benefit will be to the Tulsa Police Department, which is required to transport people in a mental health crisis to psychiatric treatment. With 56 beds in the Tulsa area, the spots filled up quickly, mental health officials said. By contrast, there are 242 beds in the Oklahoma City area.

When the beds in Tulsa are full, police transport the patients to other facilities in the state, sometimes as far away as Fort Supply near the Oklahoma Panhandle.

To adequately meet the needs of Tulsa-area residents, more beds and treatment opportunities were needed, police and mental health officials told the Tulsa World in August.

Tulsa Police Major Tracie Lewis said the additional beds and stabilization unit will provide more options for providing citizens with the best treatment during a mental health crisis.

“We come into contact with so many people who don’t need ‘hospitalization,’ they just need some stabilization,” Lewis said. “Officers have no where to take people for that, so they end up in a hospital bed. This outpatient crisis unit is perfect for those individuals.”

Read more about this story in Friday’s Tulsa World.

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20 Sep 2012

House bill allows taxpayers to donate to Treasury

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WASHINGTON — Feel your taxes are too low? House Republicans have devised a new convenient way for those worried about government red ink to donate more to the Treasury.

And in a dig at President Barack Obama and his favorite billionaire, they have named the bill the Buffett Rule Act after investor Warren Buffett, who has said that he and other wealthy people don’t pay enough in taxes.

The legislation, approved in the House on Wednesday and heading for an uncertain fate in the Senate, creates a checkbox on tax forms allowing taxpayers to make donations above their normal tax liability for debt reduction.

The original Obama-backed Buffett Rule bill, which failed in the Senate last April, would have required top earners to pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes.

Obama “has used Warren Buffett as the poster-child for his class warfare scheme because Buffett complains that he doesn’t pay enough in taxes,” said bill sponsor Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La.

“The Buffett Rule Act is a common sense alternative to President Obama’s divisive class warfare calls for higher taxes, and it allows Warren Buffett and others like him to voluntarily donate more of their money to pay down our national debt if that is what they’re really interested in doing.”

Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said there was “nothing wrong with this bill except the label.” The bill, he said, has “zero to do with the Buffett rule. It has everything to do with the absolute refusal of Republicans to face the basic issue,” the level of taxes that the wealthy pay.

The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., said the bill offered a simple way for people concerned about the debt to contribute. Now, he said, people must either send a separate check or money order to the Bureau of Public Debt or go online to that website and use a credit card.

He cited Joint Committee of Taxation estimates that the bill would reduce the public debt by $135 million over 10 years.

Donations to pay down the national debt are tax deductible under current law.

The IRS already has a checkbox on its income tax form for making a $3 contribution to the presidential election campaign fund.

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Category: Donations Tags: donations, mental health charities Comments off

20 Sep 2012

Catholic Restructuring Professionals Form Charity

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By Katy Stech

Critics who see the restructuring world as unholy are left without an attack on the industry’s latest effort to raise money for the poor.

A handful of Roman Catholic professionals in the corporate restructuring industry have rallied their colleagues for a new charity called Catholic Renewal.

The organization—the Catholic equivalent to the mighty United Jewish Appeal—has raised at least $494,000 to pass on to organizations that help the poor. That tally includes more than $245,000 that trickled in during a fundraiser on Wednesday night at the Davis Polk law firm.

The organization’s first leap of faith? The charity first came together to raise money in 2010 during a lingering economic downturn that didn’t hit restructuring and bankruptcy professionals quite as hard.

Founder Mark McDermott of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher Flom said that while the industry has seen behavior “that pays no heed to the religious virtues,” there is a strange alignment between religion and restructuring. In a memo he wrote to his colleagues:

“We’ve all been involved in seemingly hopeless situations—deals that are taken to the very brink of the abyss—only to be pulled back through ’round-the-clock’ efforts of restructuring professionals working together. And we’ve all felt that extraordinary sense of exhausted exultation when everything falls into place: a company survives; value is preserved; jobs are saved.”

Catholic Renewal is a branch of the well-established Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York. (McDermott wrote that the group’s name refers to the revivalist mission of the restructuring industry: “The word renewal refers to what we do as restructuring professionals: we are privileged to be part of the only economic and legal system in the world that allows us to help troubled enterprises try again; to ‘renew’ themselves.”)

The group doesn’t have formal membership, but its mailing list tops 700 people. Respected industry leaders such as Corrine Ball, William Derrough, Lisa Donahue, Dennis Dunne, John Rapisardi, Barry Ridings and Edward Stenger are helping the group get its start by sitting on its steering committee.

Write to Katy Stech at katy.stech@dowjones.com.

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Category: Charities Tags: charities, mental health charities Comments off