With ex-patients dying, Idaho was ‘flipping couch cushions’ to restore this program
An Idaho program to keep severely mentally ill patients on their meds was out of commission for five months after Idaho’s Health and Welfare Department cut the program in December amid state budget shortages.
Four patients died during that time, and providers warned of risks to public safety if patients went untreated and got violent.
With just days left in the 2026 legislative session, and a mounting sense of the program’s importance with the news of each patient death, lawmakers in April cobbled together the funds to revive it, said Laura Scuri, a behavioral health provider whose private practice contracts with the state to run the program in the Boise area.
Assertive Community Treatment, or ACT, had for decades sought to find and help treat people suffering from conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Providers made the case to lawmakers that the program represented a cost savings for the state: By spending less than $100 each day on an ACT patient, taxpayers could avoid spending thousands on a revolving door of hospitalizations, court hearings and jail time.
With lawmakers’ growing buy-in, “we were flipping couch cushions” late in the session to find state funding for the program in a tight budget year, Scuri told the Idaho Statesman on Friday by phone.
But bringing the program back online now is no easy feat. During the months without funding, providers laid off highly trained caregivers and lost track of dozens of patients, who needed home visits and intense outreach to stay connected to the program, said Ric Boyce, who contracted with the state to oversee the Pocatello portion of the state program.
“We are making phone calls. We’re going out knocking on doors. We go into places we know they hang out,” Boyce said. “If somebody’s homeless, we’re going to the kinds of places we know they stay. We’re doing everything we can to make contact.”
Many of the teams have managed to find about half of their former patients, Scuri said. Boyce said providers are “very concerned” about the ones they haven’t been able to reach. And because providers are paid based on the number of patients they see, the time spent tracking down former patients is done on their own dime.
A ‘no-confidence vote’ from providers after sudden program cut
After funding was cut in December, about half of the providers who worked with Scuri decided to leave the field, she said.
“ ‘I do not want to work in mental health anymore. I don’t want to work like this anymore,’” Scuri recalled them saying. She called it a “no-confidence vote — an ‘I don’t trust this.’ ”
Now, she and other team leads are scrambling to re-hire practitioners and offer training to newcomers.
Lawmakers were able to fully fund ACT through mid-2027, said Rep. Ben Fuhriman, R-Shelley, who led an effort — unsuccessfully, at least this session — to move the program into law and require the state to fund it every year.
Instead, lawmakers allocated various one-time funds to reach the $4 million in state funding for the program — a temporary win, but one that’s left Fuhriman and providers feeling trepidation about the program’s stability.
“I don’t know what the future is going to hold,” Fuhriman told the Statesman by phone. “We’re going to have to have this battle again next session.”
