Hundreds of mentally ill people who have been confined to nursing homes, sometimes in prisonlike conditions, would move to apartments or other housing within three years under a legal settlement with New York State.

Moving to end the state’s lax oversight of the developmentally disabled, the Cuomo administration on Wednesday announced an agreement with the State Police to establish guidelines for reporting possible crimes against the disabled to law enforcement authorities.

I SPOKE at an AIDS conference not long ago, and after the talk, someone asked me how I had contracted H.I.V. “Well,” I replied, “sexually.” Staring at my crutches, which I have used since I got polio as a child, she exclaimed, “But how?”

Jonathan Carey did not die for lack of money.
New York State and the federal government provided $1.4 million annually per person to care for Jonathan and the other residents of the Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center, a warren of low-rise concrete and brick buildings near Albany.

Health-care providers on Wednesday lambasted state changes to a Medicaid program that make it harder for patients, particularly the elderly, to get in-home care for such everyday activities as eating, bathing and going to the bathroom.

State-supported mental health care, like many social services, has been especially vulnerable in the recent rounds of budget cuts. Over the past two years, some $1.6 billion has been slashed from non-Medicaid state spending on mental health, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But a growing number of law enforcement officials — along with mental health advocates — are voicing concerns that such cutbacks not only hurt mental health beneficiaries but also overburden the country’s prison system.

Advocates for people with disabilities have filed a federal class-action lawsuit seeking to block the state from cutting in-home care services to 4,000 low-income individuals who need extensive assistance to remain at home and out of an institution.

Reporting from Reno— The woman slouched on the steps of the rundown motel, her hair mussed, her pinkish outfit rumpled, her expression perplexed. Health officials were combing the brick-facade building where she lived for bed bugs as part of a multi-agency raid, while police banged on door after door, hunting for ex-felons.

The peach pages that come in the mail and the letter that follows put thousands of Tennesseans in a deep blue funk so severe that some wonder if they can keep on living.

Karen Alexander says she is “one of the lucky ones.” Ten years after learning she has Parkinson’s disease, she takes two drugs to control her symptoms and so far has few of them. A tremor on her left side can make it hard to balance a teacup and saucer, but “at 74, it doesn’t bother me much,” she said. Luckily, Ms. Alexander, who lives in a suburb west of Chicago, is right-handed.