I don’t know you had them before
We also had county healthcare back in the era before five dollar copay and TennCare
That’s public assistance medical here
This is where it all started
Not the costs
A couple of these closed places are “attractive nuisances” that cops must regularly patrol because they become hangouts for local kids; they’d love to re-purpose them but often have no takers. One of our county parks has ruins of one from a century ago; it was in the news more recently because while constructing a new highway interchange the bodies of former patients were discovered in a lost potters field there. The cemetery at a closed one in NY is absolutely eerie; many of the plots have numbers instead of names. When a forum commenter complained that this was a terrible way for the facility to treat the deceased, another responded that this was done according to the family’s wishes - they didn’t want it known a family member had been committed there. Another closed here in NJ when laws were passed in 1970s requiring patients that could work be paid minimum wage; they became too expensive to operate.
As more and more socialism creeps into our culture, people unable to produce become a real drag; it is no accident that assisted suicide laws and desperate attempts to protect abortion rights (which mainly targets poor minority areas) are coinciding with a whole new crop of penniless immigrants. Our elites see this imported underclass as a desperately needed replacement population, but understand many won’t be paying for their own maintenance. When ObamaCare was admittedly designed to provide health insurance for illegals in part by cutting Medicare, it couldn’t have become more clear.