Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. TONKO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 2646, the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act. While this bill is not perfect and necessarily represents a compromise from all sides, it is a good first step in making the improvement to our Nation's mental health system. It has been a long road to get here, and the passionate debate we have had has only served to strengthen the bill and produce legislation that we can all support.

In particular, I would like to highlight section 502, which is based on my Coordinating Crisis Care Act, which I sponsored. This provision would authorize a new grant program at SAMHSA to fund the development of real-time bed registry systems that will help get individuals in crisis the appropriate care they need in a timely fashion. By ensuring better coordination of crisis care systems, we can save lives and support individuals and families in their time of need.

Looking forward, Congress needs to do more to heal a broken mental health system. We should pass additional legislation that would ensure vigorous enforcement of our mental health parity laws and to strengthen mental health and substance use coverage for Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries. That is ultimately the key to quality performance here for the mental health community.

Finally, we have to acknowledge that the current dysfunction in our mental health systems stems, in part, from decades of broken promises and a chronic underinvestment in community-based mental health services that simply cannot be solved by one single bill like this.

We must do better, and I stand ready to help in that fight.

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