(June 22, 2016) The Bloomberg editorial board has come out in support of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (HR 2646) – landmark mental health legislation which recently passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee markup and will now move on to the House floor (“Better mental health care is worth the expense,” Bloomberg, June 21).
“When more than half of people who need mental health care can’t or don’t get it – as is true in the U.S. – other problems arise,” write the editors. For those suffering with severe mental illness, these problems may include incarceration, homelessness, suicide and fatal police encounters, among others.
For these reasons, and many more, we need HR 2646 now.
“The bill, which could soon get a vote, would give mental health issues more weight within the Department of Health and Human Services and improve tracking of wait times for psychiatric beds,” the editors explain.
And it would remove numerous restraints on mental health care. For example, HR 2646 would reform the discriminatory IMD exclusion barriers to increase the availability of psychiatric inpatient beds.
Mental health reform is long overdue. In the past five years alone, nearly 20% of the inpatient psychiatric beds for the nation's most severely ill were eliminated, at the same time demand for them skyrocketed, according to a 2016 Treatment Advocacy Center report.
As Bloomberg points out, “To expand psychiatric care as much as is needed would necessarily increase spending…But adequate spending on mental health would save other social and government costs down the road.“
HR 2646 is the strongest mental health reform bill to help people with serious mental illness and their families and ensure people with SMI have access to the treatment and care they need. The time is now.
Tell your Representatives the time is now for real mental health reform, and visit #aBedInstead to learn more about the national psychiatric bed shortage.
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