Carmen Hooker Odom Creates Panic, Backpedals

Carmen Hooker Odom and her minions throughout the Department of Health and Human Services, released an “effective immediately” memo to severely restrict access and authorization of Community Support services.  This decision came on the heels of the precipitous rate cut on April 5. 

Well – just like the Dept. was forced to climb down from their capricious decision to cut the Community Support rate, they’ve immediately climbed down from the April 24 memo.

Flo Stein, who I spoke to yesterday on the phone and who repeatedly rebutted any claim that the DHHS is destabilizing the system, sent this into my inbox:

“The proposed policy is out for comment and has not be [sic] adopted yet.  Once feed back [sic] is received, a refined version will be released.  The effective date for the new authorization policy will be June 11, 2007.”

The Secretary’s strategy appears to be:

1.  Make terrible, impulsive decision
2.  Wait for mental health community to panic
3.  Back off decision and start studying ways to fix the system
4.  Blame providers for “abuse” and being reactionary.

You did it again, all you callers and emailers.  You got the bastards to back down.

The fight is far from over.  These people are biding their time until they can try to kill the system again.  The only way to rebuild trust in the DHHS is to fire Carmen Hooker Odom and start looking at ways to improve our system.