Patrick J. Kennedy

when mental health gets 0.04 percent of the CARES Act funding, it says a lot about where mental health is in this country.

So if I were both a liberal or a conservative, parity would be a big issue for me.

I think, obviously, when you look at the fact that so many of our jails are filled with people with mental illnesses and addictions, that clearly a better response than occupying police time would be to make sure that proper first…

the bottom line is, when I go into the ER, if I am going in with COVID or something else and they don't understand about my underlying psychiatric issues, or in the case of addiction they do not know that I am someone who suffered from the…

Well, it is obviously the key driver in terms of ability to provide the services necessary, because while there is a suspension now and people are using it, that is not going to continue unless the biggest payer of all, CMS, steps up and…

And really, in essence, this is corporate welfare of the first order. We are allowing the richest companies in our country, the healthcare insurance companies, who, by the way, are sitting on a boatload of cash because they have never had…

We can't even get $20 million to even--and by the way, for my Republican friends, enforcing parity means making sure that insurance companies don't give the Heisman to mental health and addiction such that our taxpayers have to pay the…

Congress and the country have really never appropriated the necessary resources for this crisis.

I appreciate this is a bipartisan process, especially on mental health, which affects every family.

Because I think any firefighter will tell you, these days especially, they spend more of their time trying to do first response to overdoses and mental health crisis than they do putting out fires.

Both APAs, my fellow panelist Patrick Kennedy, and the unified mental health and substance use disorder community championed the parity law in 2008, but it has failed to end discriminatory health insurance practices.

We need help from Congress to remove prejudice and discrimination and treat it just like all other forms of prejudice and discrimination.