Sheldon Whitehouse: “I was here for your point about mental health and addiction recovery care. As you will recall, you and I and others…”

“I was here for your point about mental health and addiction recovery care. As you will recall, you and I and others worked together to get the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act passed. That was a very bipartisan effort because the scourge of the opioid epidemic fell across all Americans. It was one of my happier and prouder moments when that bill actually got passed and then when the Appropriations Committee came behind the CARA bill and put funding in. But the bulk of the programs that we put together in CARA--bipartisan programs--were funded through Medicare, Medicaid. That is how you get reimbursement for those programs. So doesn't it seem peculiar that our colleagues on the other side who were so instrumental in pushing through that Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act to help their constituents at home and who at the time showed so much sensitivity to the needs of people going through addiction recovery, through all of the stages--from initial detox to in-house treatment, to sober living, and on to medication-assisted treatment sometimes, and then recovery support--all of that seemed to bind us together. What on Earth could be the madness that inspires them to tear all that down now, when they built it within the last decade with us?”