Political Quotes

“I appreciate the gentleman's amendment. Look, we all care deeply about getting mental health services into our community. In fact, under Republican leadership on the Energy and Commerce Committee a few years ago, we rewrote America's mental health laws for the first time since John Kennedy signed the last bill into law before he was tragically assassinated in Texas. It was a lot of work, but it was bipartisan work. Not only did we look at those mental health laws that were on the books, because what happens around here is somebody comes up with a new idea, so you put a new program in place, and you give an authorization. Maybe it gets funded, maybe it doesn't. A year goes by. Somebody has a new idea. Put another one on the books. Nobody ever goes back and looks at what worked and what didn't. So our colleague, Dr. Murphy, at the time, who is a psychologist and a terrific leader in this area, really drove this review and said, look, we have to help kids with mental illness, and we need to help adults. We could deal with a lot of the violence in America if you got people care. It is not that everybody with mental illness goes violent, but we do know that mental health services help people in every way and that the programs we had--we had a lot of them--weren't funded, weren't funded properly, or didn't work. Some worked better than others. We had this comprehensive review in the Energy and Commerce Committee of these different programs the Federal Government has.…”