SEATTLE (AP) – When pondering how to keep low-level drug offenders out of jail, officials in Albany, New York, faced a challenge: How could they pay for a case manager to coax addicts onto the straight and narrow, sometimes by tracking them down on the streets?
The money turned up in a previously untapped source: President Barack Obama’s health care law, which by expanding Medicaid in some states has made repeat drug offenders eligible for coverage, including many who are homeless or mentally ill and have never been covered before.
The idea could make the joint federal and state health insurance program for the poor into a new tool for shifting addicts out of the criminal-justice system. Advocates hope to prove that the concept works, possibly paving the way for more cities to try it as an alternative to the drug war.
Many repeat drug offenders are “precisely the population Medicaid expansion was designed to cover,” said Gabriel Sayegh, co-founder of the Katal Center for Health, Equity and Justice, an advocacy group that aims to reduce incarceration rates and promote drug war alternatives. “Down the road, we see a path for case management and many other services to be supported by Medicaid.”
The notion of using Medicaid to steer people away from jails and into services that offer housing, job training and mental-health or substance-abuse treatment comes at a crucial time for the criminal-justice reform movement. Incarceration numbers are making headlines. States are legalizing marijuana, and police departments hammered over questionable shootings are trying to reconnect with the public they serve.