CONSOLIDATING the state’s eight separate health agencies and the multiple “programs” housed in other agencies should be a no-brainer: The mish-mash means it’s not uncommon to have, say, the Department of Social Services monitoring a parent for abuse or neglect while the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services provides drug-treatment services for that parent, who is being treated by the Department of Mental Health and receiving Medicaid coverage through the Department of Health and Human Services.

Indeed, everyone says that fixing that problem is Job One this year. It’s on the scaled-down restructuring agenda of Gov. Mark Sanford, the House Republican Caucus and Republicans and Democrats alike in the Senate. If any restructuring is to happen this year, this is it.

But there’s a big difference between passing a bill and fixing the problem.

Mr. Sanford calls merely for collapsing seven agencies and programs into three, rather than putting them all into one agency, as House Speaker David Wilkins proposed in 1990 when he co-chaired then-Gov. Carroll Campbell’s restructuring commission.

The bill filed by Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell is even less ambitious — although it is so loaded down with tiny technical changes as to scare all but the most determined policy wonks away from reading enough of it to figure out how frightfully little it does: It reduces the number of stand-alone health agencies from eight to ... seven.

And even that merger — combining the mental health and drug abuse agencies — seems little more than a paper combination. The merged agencies would still submit their own budget proposals to the Legislature, and the umbrella agency couldn’t consolidate divisions — or even office space — in the old agencies without legislative approval.

The bill does wisely move the Continuum of Care to this new agency from the governor’s office, where it and a handful of other agencies were stuffed during Restructuring I. But then it charges off in the opposite direction. Rather than moving the Foster Care Review Board and the Children’s Case Resolution System from the governor’s office into a health or welfare agency, the bill plops them down in the lieutenant governor’s office; then it moves child care center regulation from the Department of Social Services to the Department of Health and Environmental Control.

The House Republican Caucus bill hasn’t been introduced yet; a staffer said it’s still a work in progress. With luck, that work will lead to something more substantive than what the House tried during the last General Assembly.

In 2003, the House passed a bill that would eliminate just one freestanding health agency. It did give the governor direct control over the Department of Mental Health. But its restructuring centerpiece was a plan to audit health agencies in hope of coming up with ammunition to eventually persuade the Legislature that further consolidation was needed.

We don’t need more evidence. As the Legislative Audit Council concluded in its latest take on the duplicative health agencies, in the fall: “If programs with similar services were consolidated into fewer agencies, under the authority of a single cabinet secretary, the need for different agencies to make referrals to each other and to coordinate their similar services would be reduced. Administrative costs, in most cases, could be reduced, while planning and budgeting could be unified.”

What we need is the will to use the ammunition we already have.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.