Congressman Ami Bera sent a letter to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U. S. Attorney General calling for an investigation into Nevada’s practice of busing mentally ill patients to other states. Twenty other California Members of Congress also signed on to the letter.
“If this practice of shipping patients with a history of mental illness to other states, known colloquially as ‘Greyhound Therapy,’ is occurring, it would not only be unethical and disgraceful,” the letter read, “but would also be an illegal attempt by Nevada to evict members of the state’s most vulnerable population to benefit its bottom line.”
A recent Sacramento Bee investigation uncovered that Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas bused approximately 1,500 mentally ill patients out of Nevada since 2008, sending people to every state in the continental United States.