Our Health Policy Matters

Former U.S. Congressman Patrick Kennedy was in South Florida last week pushing the radical idea that all people, including those with mental illness, are created equal. What makes this idea radical in 2012 is that we continue to discriminate against the 6% of Americans who have serious mental illnesses.  Patrick Kennedy understands this, and is devoting his life after Congress to fighting on their behalf. It is a fight that affects him personally, as it does the one-fifth of all children and the one-fourth of all adults with a diagnosable mental illness each year. Discrimination against people with mental illness takes on many forms – arrests for loitering, incarceration instead of treatment, and perhaps most commonly in the unequal coverage by insurers for mental health conditions. This last form of discrimination was supposed to have ended with the passage of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.  But the federal “rule” implementing t...

Former U.S. Congressman Patrick Kennedy was in South Florida last week pushing the radical idea that all people, including those with mental illness, are created equal. What makes this idea radical in 2012 is that we continue to discriminate against the 6% of Americans who have serious mental illnesses.  Patrick Kennedy understands this, and is devoting his life after Congress to fighting on their behalf. It is a fight that affects him personally, as it does the one-fifth of all children and the one-fourth of all adults with a diagnosable mental illness each year. Discrimination against people with mental illness takes on many forms – arrests for loitering, incarceration instead of treatment, and perhaps most commonly in the unequal coverage by insurers for mental health conditions. This last form of discrimination was supposed to have ended with the passage of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.  But the federal “rule” implementing t...