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It’s been 10 years since the Cuomo administration imposed a managed-care model on Medicaid’s behavioral health services, allowing mostly for-profit health plan “middlemen” to oversee mental health and substance use disorder care for New Yorkers under Medicaid.

The use of this managed-care model has been a costly experiment, not only in financial terms, but in the number of lives lost or endangered. It places an unnecessary burden on taxpayers, restricts access to care and threatens the viability of community-based treatment providers.

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When Gov. Kathy Hochul releases her executive budget in January, she must remove community-based mental health and substance use disorder services from the state’s Medicaid managed-care program. By eliminating the middlemen, the state can save hundreds of millions of dollars per year and ensure that more funding goes to the actual care New Yorkers need.

Over the last decade, insurers have been paid handsomely by the state despite failing to comply with federal and state parity laws and other........

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