If the latest report in the News & Observer is accurate, the state itself has acted at least as poorly as the maligned community service providers.
North Carolina’s newest and oldest mental hospitals could both lose federal funding, joining Cherry Hospital. (Broughton Hospital went without for a year.) Central Regional Hospital has been using the Dorothea Dix Hospital provider number to bill Medicare and Medicaid for reimbursements. Central Regional has not been accredited, and so does not have a provider number of its own. Mechanical problems also continue to plague the hospital and may have contributed to a patient’s reported hypothermia.
Every hospital in the state has been threatened with losing its federal reimbursements, and yet people still blame the mental health system’s problems on privatization.
