The head of a mental health crisis center in southern Iowa expects it to close at the end of the month due to a lack of funding. Jackie Sharp is executive director of Oak Place in Centerville. She says after a grant ran out, the regional mental health authority has refused to fill the funding gap. And state officials haven’t set up rules that would let Oak Place bill Medicaid for services to patients.
The center opened three years ago and has won praise for providing economical care in rural Iowa, where mental health treatment options are scarce.
The Centerville facility serves patients from four south central Iowa counties. Advocates say once the center closes, the state will pay about 900-dollars-per-day for psychiatric hospital stays for a Medicaid patient who’d get significantly less expensive care, closer to home, in Centerville.
