Bob Wise: “I, of course, will rise in support of this bill. It is a small bill. It is important to certain segments of our…”

“I, of course, will rise in support of this bill. It is a small bill. It is important to certain segments of our community, provisions here that cry out to be done and need to have been done for a long time. I also want to talk about what is not in the bill. What is not in the bill is mental health. I guess I have great concerns about that because as co-chair of the mental health working group, a bipartisan group in Congress, there were 116 of us who signed a letter to the conferees asking that the Senate provisions on parity, that is, that mental health be treated by insurance companies as so-called physical health problems, be retained. There is nothing in this bill for mental health. There is no language concerning parity. There is not the language that was proposed about raising the lifetime caps on insurance policies on mental health to at least the same level and other types of health care policies. There is not even a commission to study. Yet we have 20 percent of Americans at sometime who are going to experience mental health or substance abuse problems; 30 million Americans will have some kind of problems with mental health and mental illness, yet only 20 percent of those are able to seek help, only 20 percent of those. Some say you cannot have mental health in there because it is a lot different. You do not treat mental health the same as physical health. You know a broken arm, you can treat that.…”