Pete Domenici: “fellow Senators, let me take a few minutes. First, I rise with a sense of great sadness and yet a feeling of great hope.…”

“fellow Senators, let me take a few minutes. First, I rise with a sense of great sadness and yet a feeling of great hope. You really can have both votes in yourself at the same time. Two nights ago Mental Health Equitable Treatment of 2001 was dropped from the Labor-HHS appropriations conference report. The Senate passed a wonderful bill. We sent it to the House as part of Labor appropriations, even though it was a major, major authorizing bill. We had our hopes high because in the Senate the support was high. The time had come to make sure, 2 years from now in the United States, most insurance policies would cover the mentally ill. That meant to this Senator in 8 or 10 years we would be able to look back and see a very different America when it came to street people, people who during cold winter months we see on the grates of our cities with the blankets wrapped around them. In our jails and prisons, we know that now and for the ensuing months those who have mental illnesses such as distress that comes from depression, manic depression, schizophrenia, and a whole host of serious mental diseases, are more apt to be found in the county jail or the State jail than they are in treatment centers, be they treatment centers to which you take your sick person, and they are run privately or publicly. More mentally ill people, men and women, are in jails and facilities not intended for them than there are in facilities intended for them.”