Patrick J. Kennedy: “It is absolutely the wrong policy for our country to be privatizing the commons.”

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.

there are hundreds of thousands of my fellows in America who are dying because their medical system does not know they have an underlying addiction because it doesn't show in the EMR that they have been treated for addiction.

When we have an emergency, FEMA comes in. They've got housing, job opportunities, support of this and that. We need a strategy that understands that housing is critical to address the homeless epidemic of people with severe mental illness…

We have so underfunded this system for so long, why is it a big surprise that we don't have enough providers in the field?