Spring Grove patients destined to be shortchanged — as so often happens with mental health care

Your editorial about the sale of Spring Grove Hospital Center to the University of Maryland Baltimore County (“Spring Grove deal puts patients last,” May 19) includes one very disturbing statement: “The state health department’s facilities master plan calls for ‘developing strategic partnerships to transition services currently provided’ at Spring Grove to ‘healthcare and community providers.’ ”

We have heard this before ad nauseum. These services either never appear or go to the lowest bidder with disastrous results. One (although not the only) reason why we are having a mental health crisis is that the state decided to save money by getting out of the mental health care field and then not pay enough to treatment providers so as to attract quality ones.

And so it goes.