Oklahoma lawmakers’ failure to fund 988 mental health line sends chilling message about their values

Mental illness doesn’t check voter registration. Suicide doesn’t screen for partisanship. These crises are indiscriminate and omnipresent, cutting across class, race and creed. 

Yet Oklahoma’s failure to fully fund its 988 mental health crisis hotline reveals something chilling: for many state leaders, saving lives is negotiable — so long as it’s politically inconvenient.

In 2024, more than 39,000 Oklahomans called 988 in moments of acute distress. The hotline has become a vital alternative to 911 for those experiencing suicidal ideation, substance abuse crises, or psychosis — circumstances in which police presence is often inappropriate, and occasionally lethal. 

This is not a theoretical benefit. It is a demonstrable public health tool. And yet, lawmakers continue to defer, delay, and dilute every serious effort to secure its future.

The preferred mechanism to sustain 988 — a modest monthly telecom fee — has failed in the Oklahoma Legislature. Despite being modeled after the fee that funds 911, lawmakers balk at this proposal, wary of the optics. Some cite inflation. Others gesture vaguely toward “tax fatigue.” But all of them are missing the point.

This is not a fiscal debate. It is a referendum on priorities.

When the state wants to fund something, it does — and Oklahoma is proving that. Even as the legality is still being debated by the U.S. Supreme Court, Oklahoma has been fighting to direct public dollars toward a religious charter school. Meanwhile, State Superintendent Ryan Walters has proposed spending $3 million to put Bibles in classrooms.

As of mid-2024, the Office of Management and Enterprise Services reported $8.5 billion in state collections — 2.1% above the year’s projected estimate. 

There is no budgetary emergency. There is, however, a chronic unwillingness to spend political capital on the unglamorous work of mental health care.

But the clock is ticking. Federal funding might carry Oklahoma through fiscal year 2026, but how much longer can we keep kicking the can down the road? Hard decisions can only be postponed for so long. Without a sustainable revenue stream, Oklahoma risks gutting a system that has already proven its value.

And people will die. Not metaphorically. Not someday. Actually. Soon.

When the state abdicates responsibility, the burden does not vanish — it shifts. It falls to emergency rooms, already overwhelmed. It falls to police, untrained and ill-equipped. It falls to families, who are left to navigate overdose, psychosis, and suicidal crisis without trained professionals. 

And when the system fails, it is not the politicians who pay the price. It is the parent identifying a child in the morgue. It is the patient handcuffed during a panic attack. It is the person who dies on hold.

Let’s be clear: this is not about the money. It’s about optics. About cowardice. About lawmakers who want credit for caring, but not the consequences of doing.

To call 988 “life-saving” in a press release and then vote against funding it is not just hypocrisy — it’s complicity. 

The same legislators who boast of their mental health platforms during campaign season are the ones now waffling over 60 cents a year. That’s the cost of the proposed surcharge. Less than a drive-thru meal. Less than a single Starbucks run. And yet, for some, even that is too much.

Nationally, the need is unmistakable. Suicide remains the 11th leading cause of death in the United States, and Oklahoma’s suicide rate has risen by nearly 49% over the last two decades. Oklahoma ranks among the worst in the nation for health and well-being, and 1 in 5 adults report a diagnosable mental illness. In rural counties, access is often nonexistent.

The 988 line isn’t a silver bullet. But it is a start — a bridge between crisis and care. The hotline connects callers to trained behavioral health responders, often dispatching mobile crisis teams instead of law enforcement. It prevents unnecessary ER visits. It de-escalates violent episodes. It saves lives. All for less than a dollar per person per month.

This is policy at its most basic: spend a little to save a lot. But too many lawmakers are focused on ideological optics over empirical outcomes. They fear being labeled as tax-and-spend liberals. They fear their own base. And so they equivocate, allowing a proven, necessary, life-saving system to twist in the political wind.

There is no bipartisan spin that can reconcile this contradiction. You cannot champion mental health while defunding its infrastructure. You cannot claim to care about life and then balk at funding the system that protects it. And you cannot, in good conscience, govern a state where the price of survival is deemed too high at 60 cents.