No Missed Revenue Opportunities in Illinois' Mental Health Vision

The Illinois Children's Mental Health Partnership have a new tool on their site. Pretty clever. If people are directed to their site for first hand documentation of their Plan, then maybe they'll take a look instead at Frequently Asked Questions instead to get a brief synopsis. Rather than wading through their now 31 pages of the Illinois Children's Mental Health Plan by reading facts, I suppose they hope people will read their happy talk version. Problem is, their denials in their brief synopsis are very wishy washy in reality (documentation).
Here's some of their answers with some of my added details. They say:

little attention is placed on children’s
mental health until problems become severe. Nationally, over 20 percent of children have a diagnosable mental health problem, and only one in five of these children are receiving services.

This language (20% or 1 in 5 children) matches up with the 1999 Surgeon General's Report.

Approximately one in five children and adolescents experiences the signs and symptoms of a DSM-IV disorder during the course of a year, but only about 5 percent of all children experience what professionals term “extreme functional impairment.”

The state Plan can be more easily supplied with federal funding when their language matches up. At the Fee-For-Service Initiatives Committee hearing I attended, the Public Aid spokesperson Anne Marie Murphy stated that they

need to maximize federal funding which is critical.

It was also suggested that they use a recovery model (to retrieve funding)

by getting a copy of and implementing the New Freedom Report

The response was that they had already done that. It's called their Vision Report. And searching for the word voluntary in this 117 page document is a different version (page 48) than displayed in their FAQs

Missed appointments are missed revenue opportunities. Agencies may, in response, make enrollment less "voluntary" for difficult to serve consumers.

More later