Greyhound's motto is "leave the driving to us," not "we are mental healthcare officials"

Greyhound's motto is "leave the driving to us," not "we are mental healthcare officials"

The state of Nevada and its primary psychiatric hospital “intentionally and wrongfully” foisted the cost of caring for indigent mentally ill people onto California cities and counties by issuing patients bus tickets out of town without making proper arrangements for their care, a lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco charges. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed the class-action lawsuit against Nevada, Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas and state mental health administrators, seeking reimbursement for the care of indigent patients he said the system “dumped” onto California in an effort to save money.

The practice, now discontinued, was exposed by the Sacramento Bee, which reported that Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada’s primary state mental health facility, had sent a 48-year-old patient on a 15-hour bus ride to Sacramento, where he arrived disoriented with no family, friends, or arrangements for housing or care. The hospital had allegedly told him to call 911 when he arrived.

Since July 2008, Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas has transported more than 1,500 patients to other cities via Greyhound bus, sending at least one person to every state in the continental United States, according to a Bee review of bus receipts kept by Nevada's mental health division.

In recent years, as Nevada has slashed funding for mental health services, the number of mentally ill patients being bused out of southern Nevada has steadily risen, growing 66 percent from 2009 to 2012. During that same period, the hospital has dispersed those patients to an ever-increasing number of states.

Nevada and San Francisco have tentatively agreed upon $400,000 to settle the lawsuit San Francisco filed two years ago. Nevada, in lieu of helping the psychiatric patients in their care, bought at least 24 patients one-way tickets out of Nevada to the Bay Area. An example of how inhumane this practice, if you can call it a "practice," was:While this is a good settlement for the Bay Area in that they were looking for about $500,000, this is just the tip of the iceberg for Nevada. It turns out that busing patients around the country has been Nevada's modus operandi. Why would this happen?Nevada's Governor Brian Sandoval is pretty awful when it comes to healthcare in general—a classic taking credit for all of the federal funding he's gotten while pretending he didn't accept the Affordable Care Act—you know, that practice.

The Sacramento Bee did all of the heavy lifting in this story.