(June 23, 2016) Community health centers that say even if they could afford to hire 200 new mental health professionals, their caseloads would be full within the week. Insurance companies that refuse to approve mental health coverage on weekends, leaving patients in emergency rooms for several days. Emergency room directors, who can find an in-patient bed for someone facing a physical ailment in just three hours but who spend nearly a full day finding a place for a patient with a mental health crisis. Parents forced to work as full-time caseworkers for their own children. Children refused the care they need because outdated government regulations put limits on their treatment.
This is the heartbreaking reality I heard echoed in a series of discussions I held in our communities for Mental Health Awareness Month. The physicians, families, community health centers, hospital CEOs and advocates who met with me gave a stark picture of the state of mental health care in our commonwealth and country.
They detailed a vastly underfunded mental and behavioral health system that lacks the infrastructure required to deliver proper care to the one in four Americans struggling with mental illness.
It was a timely discussion. Down in Washington, Congress is considering how to respond to our country’s growing mental health crisis. Led by the Energy & Commerce Committee on which I serve, we are trying to craft bipartisan solutions for a system plagued by lack of access, funding and stability.
Any comprehensive reform effort must move beyond the margins and attack the systemic inadequacies deeply entrenched across the entire continuum of mental healthcare. First, we have to put teeth behind the federal laws that require insurance companies treat mental health the same way they treat physical health. Referred to as “parity,” these laws were intended to ensure that depression, schizophrenia and addiction are covered to the same extent as cancer, diabetes, or a broken leg. Despite having these laws on the books, however, mental health claims are denied today at nearly twice the rate of physical health claims, often with no explanation.
Our health care system doesn’t wait until someone has stage four cancer to offer treatment; those struggling with mental illness deserve the same.
We need to fix outdated federal regulations that currently say a person in Medicaid who requires in-patient care can receive treatment for either physical or mental health – but not both. We need to end Medicare’s 190-day lifetime limit on inpatient psychiatric hospitals stays. And we need to finally and fully invest in the entire continuum of mental health care – not just the crisis-stage interventions we resort to in emergency rooms, courtrooms, and jail cells at tremendous cost.
The pain that our broken mental health system has inflicted on countless American families and communities is immeasurable. Government at every level must work day and night to address the shortcomings that continue to allow tragedy and suffering to occur.
U.S. REP. JOE KENNEDY III
MASSACHUSETTS
Read the entire column here.
To comment, visit our Facebook page.
Visit our blog archive to read all our recent posts.