If you or someone you know is in immediate danger of harming themselves, please call 911. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text “WYO” to 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.
CASPER, Wyo. — Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon’s “Mental Health Summit” kicked off Tuesday morning at the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper.
“Building partnerships and expanding our collaborative efforts will help deliver timely mental health services to those experiencing difficulty accessing help,” Gordon said in a press release from his office on Tuesday. “In order to address the scope of the problem, we must be actively engaged in finding solutions.”
As legislators arrived for the Mental Health Summit on Tuesday morning, people with Healthy Wyoming greeted them outside of the NIC urging Wyoming lawmakers to take action to expand Medicaid, arguing that getting more people access to health insurance is necessary if the state really wants to address mental health and other issues.
“Medicaid expansion we need so bad because it’s all a domino effect,” Linda Jones with Healthy Wyoming said. “Homelessness, drugs, cancer — it just all falls together. [Expanding Medicaid] will help people so much. We really need it.”
Maureen Barnes volunteers with not only Healthy Wyoming but also organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness Wyoming, the Natrona County Suicide Prevention Task Force and the Natrona Collective Health Trust. She and Jones also work with Casper’s Council of People With Disabilities.
Wyoming has the highest suicide rate per capita in the country, Barnes said. Addressing suicide and other mental health issues is something a coalition of around 50 people in the Casper area are working on in conjunction with the Natrona Collective Health Trust, she added.
“We have a model that we’re working on here in Casper to help streamline [services for] people that need mental health help,” Barnes said. “We’re all working in conjunction with each other. There’s like 50 of us that meet once a month. We just formed a crisis intervention team, which will be meeting later this week.”
Barnes works with Advance Abilities to provide respite care to people with disabilities in the Casper area. That work and the volunteer work she does with various nonprofits in the community gives her insight into how physical, mental and emotional health cannot ultimately be addressed in isolation as separate issues.
“We’re great big advocates to help people with their mental health and other issues that they have,” Barnes said. “Medicaid expansion is needed and necessary. Otherwise, we can’t do it.”
While there are efforts to make mental health services available in a more streamlined way across the community, that work falls flat if people don’t have insurance to pay for the services, Barnes said.
When people go to emergency rooms or hospital rooms without insurance, that can lead to medical bills they are unable to pay. Uncompensated care stresses the healthcare system and leads to financial risks that can threaten the future of hospitals, Bella Pope with Healthy Wyoming said.
Montana expanded Medicaid in 2016 and that has created benefits beyond expanding health insurance to more people, Pope said.
“Their uncompensated care has greatly decreased,” Pope said. “Uncompensated care is usually what causes hospitals and community clinics to have to close down or to be short-staffed. We in Wyoming are actually in quite a crisis — we’ve lost two different health centers in the last couple years as well as a maternity wing.”
Expanding Medicaid wouldn’t fix everything that needs to be addressed in Wyoming’s healthcare system, Pope said. However, she said she thinks it is a necessary first step.
“It’s a really good first step in getting people the care that they need,” she said. “When we think about Wyoming and we think about what the end goal is — we really want affordable, accessible and effective healthcare.”
Polling indicates that there are about 24,000 people in Wyoming without access to any healthcare, Pope noted.
“That’s the inability to go to a doctor, that’s the inability to get preventative care on time before using the emergency room as their doctor — which gets expensive.”
The more expensive medical bills become, the greater the debt people find themselves facing, Pope said. Jones added that she thinks expanding Medicaid could lead to an increase in tax collections as people would have a greater ability to make such payments if they weren’t burdened by medical debt.
Expanding Medicaid could offer health insurance to thousands of people who don’t have it in Wyoming and could also lead to lower premiums for people who do have insurance, Pope said. While the effect wouldn’t be immediate, Pope said she thinks Medicaid expansion would reduce the need for healthcare providers to pass on costs to those who can afford insurance to make up for the uncompensated care they are providing to people without insurance.
“There really is this inflation that we’re seeing in our healthcare market in general that Medicaid expansion could really structurally help address,” she said.
Wyoming is also leaving federal money on the table by not expanding Medicaid, Pope added.
When people don’t have health insurance to seek mental and physical help, that can lead them to self-medicate with alcohol or other drugs, Jones added.
“They need the medicine,” she said. “They’re gonna find it somewhere.”
While the Wyoming Legislature defeated an attempt to expand Medicaid during its 2022 Budget Session, Barnes said some of the legislators Healthy Wyoming volunteers talked to on Tuesday morning expressed support for expansion.
While Medicaid has not been expanded in Wyoming, Pope said there may be other options for people who aren’t making a ton of money every year. She encouraged people to reach out to Enroll Wyoming, which offers free assistance finding available healthcare options.
“They’re one of the big reasons that I was able to get healthcare last year,” Pope said.
The Governor’s Mental Health Summit will continue through Wednesday at the NIC. While it is sold out, the summit can be livestreamed via Wyoming PBS.
“The summit agenda and a link to the livestream is available here,” the governor’s office said in its press release Tuesday.
