Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor today to join my good friend from Louisiana, Senator Cassidy, as we formally introduce to the Chamber the Mental Health Reform Act of 2015. I thank him personally for all the time he has put into this not only as a Member of the Senate but previous to this as a Member of the House of Representatives.

This effort is patterned after a bill Senator Cassidy and my namesake, Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, worked on for years in the House of Representatives.

I wish to begin by sharing a story with you--that is the way Senator Cassidy ended. I will talk about a woman from Bloomfield, CT, named Betsy. She has a 28-year-old son, John, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder. It is a serious mental illness whose signs began showing when John was 15 years old. He was hospitalized--think about this--15 different times between the ages of 15 years old and 18 years old, generally only for time-limited stays ranging from about 5 days to maybe 2 weeks. Despite the severity of the condition, he was told upon discharge there was really nowhere for him to go, no permanent solution for this young man. He was just an adolescent, but his parents were told there was no place for him to be treated. What resulted was not only John getting to a breaking point but his parents as well.

As we know, serious mental illness doesn't affect just the individual person, it also affects family members who are trying to care for them.

Without needed supports and services, John became increasingly remote and psychotic until he was hospitalized again. Upon discharge this time, John went to a shelter--the only place he could go. Since he couldn't follow the shelter's rules, John, whom his mother said was ``young, fragile, vulnerable and mentally unstable,'' was kicked out to survive homeless on the streets.

John finally--finally--was able to get a bed at a place that was able to house him for longer than 2 weeks, Connecticut Valley Hospital. That ability to get John stabilized for a longer period of time, get him into a real treatment plan, allowed him to then transfer into a community bed in Middletown, CT. That is where John is today. John has been living successfully out in the community for 3 years. But we spent millions of dollars on John's care, which led to no better outcome for him. We wasted millions of dollars and potentially thousands of hours of time because he was shuttled in and out of hospitals without any long-term treatment and without any hope for him and his family.

What Senator Cassidy and I are trying to say is that there is a better way. We are already spending billions of dollars on inadequate mental health care in this country. We need to do better, but a lot of this is just about spending money in a more effective way.

One of the programs our bill helps fund is an early-intervention program for individuals who show their first episode of psychosis. The program the National Institutes of Mental Health just evaluated--with findings released yesterday--was the RAISE Program. And in Connecticut we run a similar program called the STEP Program. What this study showed yesterday is that if you provide wraparound services to an individual who shows a first episode of psychosis--comprehensive, immediate services--you can get a dramatic decrease in the number of episodes they show later in life. In Connecticut, we found that the STEP Program reduced hospitalizations by nearly 50 percent after individuals were given those wraparound services immediately. When they did need hospitalizations later on, they were on average 6 days less than when you didn't provide those wraparound services.

These are the types of programs that could have helped Betsy's son John early so that he could have started his recovery as a teenager rather than in his twenties. They could have saved the U.S. Government and the State of Connecticut a lot of money as well.

The trendlines beyond the anecdotes are very disturbing. Mental illness has been on the rise for the past few decades. One out of five adults today is coping with mental illness. If you look at the time period from 1987 to 2007, the number of people with mental disorders who qualify for SSI has risen by 2 1/2 times. From 1980 to 2000, we put up to 72,000 people in our jails who prior to deinstitutionalization would have been in psychiatric hospitals--people who are in jail primarily or only because of their psychiatric disorder.

Just in the last 2 years alone, the number of people that HRSA estimates to be living in a mental health shortage area has gone from 91 million--that is pretty bad to start with--up to 97 million. That is just 2 years of data. Since 2005, we have closed 14 percent of our inpatient beds in this country. So what is happening is a dramatic increase in the number of people who are suffering from mental illness and a rather dramatic decrease in both outpatient and inpatient capacity. We have to provide more resources to meet the demand, but we also have to spend money better.

Senator Cassidy covered our piece of legislation accurately, so I won't go into detail, but I wish to talk about our process. What we decided to do at the beginning of this year was bring together all of the groups--the provider groups, the advocacy groups, the hospital groups--who have worked on this issue for years and then bring in those in the House of Representatives who have been working on this as well: Representative Tim Murphy and Eddie Bernice Johnson.

They have a bipartisan reform bill in the House. We decided not to start from scratch but to take their piece of legislation, knowing that it has a good chance of passage in the House, and try to build on it and improve it.

We spent 6 months meeting with all of these groups and coming up with our own consensus product that today has the support of a cross-section of behavioral advocacy groups all across the country, including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the National Council for Behavioral Health, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, social workers, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the list goes on. We also went out to our colleagues as well, knowing that nothing in the Senate can pass without not just bipartisan support but bipartisan support that reflects the diversity of both of our caucuses. We think we were able to build a good foundation of cosponsors for this bill: Senators Franken, Stabenow, Blumenthal, and Schumer on the Democratic side, and Senators Murkowski, Collins, Vitter, and Capito on the Republican side. We hope that this coalition of groups on the outside, this alliance with a reform effort in the House that we believe has legislative legs, and a good one-for-one with some cosponsors in the Senate, will allow us to move this bill forward, and we have to. We have to.

So I will end where Senator Cassidy began his remarks, which is why the Nation's attention has turned to this question of how we reform our mental health system. We lived through a tragic and gut-wrenching episode of mass destruction in Newtown, CT. Senator Cassidy has had his own experience with mass tragedy. The reality is that the reasons why we see these episodes of mass shootings are complicated, but if you read the report on Adam Lanza's intersection with Connecticut's mental health system, you will see that it failed him. It failed him and it failed his family. I don't know that correcting the mental health system alone would have changed what happened in Newtown, but I know that if we fix our mental health system, we will have a downward pressure on the episodes of mass violence that happen in this country.

But, as Senator Cassidy said, we should fix our mental health system because it is broken for everyone, regardless of whether an individual has a predisposition towards violence, because, of course, the reality is that people with mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violence than they are to be the perpetrators of violence. So there is no inherent connection between mental illness and violence. But these mass shootings have drawn the Nation's attention to what Congress can agree on right now that will try to improve public safety across this Nation.

We are not going to get a background checks bill this year. I hoped we could, but we won't. What we can get is a mental health reform bill, and that will help everyone--the case in Maine, the individual in Bloomfield, and millions of others who have had a miserable experience with a mental health system that is broken today, in part because of lack of coordination and in part because of lack of funding.

I am so thankful to Senator Cassidy for being with me on the floor today. I am grateful for his friendship and for his cooperation on bringing this truly bipartisan Mental Health Reform Act to the floor of the Senate. We recommend it to our colleagues. We look forward to the upcoming hearings in the HELP Committee that we both sit on, and we hope to be back on the floor of the Senate as soon as possible to move forward on its passage through this body.

I say thank you to my colleague in the Senate, Senator Cassidy.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me associate myself with the remarks of Senator Baldwin and Senator Portman. I thank them for making this bipartisan clarion call to bring this body together on behalf of students. There are over 6,000 students in my State of Connecticut.

I believe Senator Blumenthal is going to give some remarks as well to add Connecticut's list of schools and to debate this issue on the floor.

We have over 1,000 students at the University of Connecticut, over 700 at Yale University, 600 at the University of Bridgeport, 500 at Central Connecticut, and 400 in Eastern Connecticut.

All across Connecticut, students are able to attend college because of the Perkins Loan Program. As one of the few Members of the Senate who is still paying back my student loans, who is also saving as fast as I can for my two boys who will hopefully go to college, this debate we are having today strikes me as crazy. We should be having a debate about how we expand access to college. Instead, we are simply trying to protect the existing access we have.

In 10 years the United States has gone from the No. 1 country in the world with respect to the number of 25- to 35-year-olds with college degrees to number 12 in the world. In 10 years we have gone from first to twelfth. The answer for that is the cost of college. The cost of college is making it unaffordable for people to start and unaffordable for many others to complete it.

The Perkins Loan Program is one that doesn't require any additional expenditure of taxpayer dollars. Those 6,000 kids in Connecticut will get to continue to attend college with Perkins loans, with no additional obligation on behalf of taxpayers. That is as good a deal as we can get--no additional expenditure from the Federal Government and hundreds of thousands of kids all across the country--6,000 of them in Connecticut--get to continue in college.

I simply wanted to come to the floor to express my bewilderment that the Republican leadership is standing in the way of simply preserving the student loan programs that are on the books today. If we go back home to our districts, we are not going to hear from a lot of people who are sympathetic to this argument. They want Congress to be talking about how to make college more affordable. They would be as bewildered as many of us are that Republicans in the Senate are trying to make college less affordable, when there is absolutely no additional expenditure required in order for us simply to preserve the Perkins Loan Program as it currently exists.

Let me just add one story to the mix--the story of Amanda, who is a senior at the University of Hartford. Her family makes about $67,000 a year. People are going to be familiar with her story because that is just a little bit too much for her to be able to qualify for a Pell grant. So she has to work two different jobs to put money on top of her Stafford loans, to put money on top of the contribution her parents make, just to get into the neighborhood of being able to afford college, but what makes that final difference for Amanda is the Perkins loan.

The only reason she is able to go to the University of Hartford is because of the Perkins loan. She is doing everything we ask. Her parents are putting in some money, she is taking out loans, and she is working two jobs. She says:

I can't imagine how difficult it would have been if federal funding sources such as the Perkins loan had been eliminated as options for me. I've utilized the Perkins loan offered to me, in the full amount, every single year to resolve my account balance. Even now, in my senior year, I have no choice but to work two jobs and I'm barely getting by. Without the Perkins and other financial aid, I truly believe that I would have had to transfer to a community college where I would not have been able to accomplish nearly as much as I have here at the University of Hartford.

On behalf of her and the six other students in Connecticut who will lose their Perkins loan eligibility as long as this Republican objection lasts, I hope it will come together.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source