By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, California Health Report, February 25, 2020
California’s top health priority should be making sure that people who need mental health treatment can get it, over 90 percent of respondents said in a recent poll.
More than half of those surveyed by the California Health Care Foundation said their communities do not have enough mental health providers to meet the need. People of color often feel the lack of access more acutely, researchers found, with 75 percent of black and 57 percent of Latino respondents noting that their communities don’t have enough mental health providers, compared to 49 percent of white participants. Women were also more likely than men to say that access to treatment was limited (57 percent vs. 47 percent).
Among respondents who had sought mental health care in the last year, 42 percent of those with the government health plan Medi-Cal and 21 percent with employer-sponsored health plans said they had to wait longer than they thought was reasonable to get an appointment.
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