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When patients in South Dakota seek help for serious but manageable disabilities such as severe diabetes, blindness or mental illness, the answer is often the same: With few alternatives available, they end up in nursing homes or long-term care facilities, whether they need such care or not. In a scathing rebuke of the state’s health care system, the Justice Department said on Monday that thousands of patients were being held unnecessarily in sterile, highly restrictive group homes. That is discrimination, it said, making South Dakota the latest target of a federal effort to protect the civil rights of people with disabilities and mental illnesses, outlined in a Supreme Court decision 17 years ago. (Apuzzo, 5/2)

Gov. Dennis Daugaard's administration is reviewing the results of the investigation. The head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said people with disabilities deserve privacy, autonomy and dignity. South Dakota's long-term care system fails to give those individuals the choice to live in their own homes or communities, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. (5/2)