Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding and heading up this very important Special Order on a topic that affects every single family in America, and that is their health. As the gentleman said, yesterday we passed a very important bill, the 21st Century Cures Act, with the charge led by the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, Fred Upton. I was pleased that they included in that package our mental health reform bill, which we moved out of the Committee on Energy and Commerce unanimously in July. We have spoken about this issue at great length for the last few years because it is worthy of that time. We have spoken because of the 60 million Americans who suffer from some level of mental illness and the 10 million Americans who suffer from severe mental illness and the fact that 40 percent of them cannot get care; that half the counties in America have no psychiatrists, psychologists or social workers; that we do not have enough hospital beds for people in crisis, a shortage of 100,000; that there are only 9,000 child and adolescent psychiatrists when we need 30,000, particularly important because severe mental illness in half the cases emerges by age 14 and 75 percent by age 24; that we have seen too many lives lost, that the body count in this Nation last year related primarily and secondarily to mental illness exceeds the total combat body counts of United States soldiers in World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq combine…”