Company with 'baggage' proposes Wilsonville mental hospital

A chronic shortage of treatment facilities has put the mentally ill on Oregon's streets and in its jails in dismaying numbers. So you'd think mental health advocates would be doing backflips over the news of a proposed 100-bed psychiatric hospital in Wilsonville.

You'd be wrong.

Instead, activists are lukewarm to downright hostile, arguing Universal Health Systems's planned $35 million hospital is the wrong plan in the wrong place from the wrong company.

Universal, a for-profit, publicly traded operation, will not include an emergency room at its Wilsonville facility, which critics view as a clear signal the company intends to cherry pick the well-off and the insured as opposed to the impoverished and homeless.

Universal also has plenty of internal issues. "Clearly, this is a company with baggage," said Chris Bouneff, local head of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

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