Word: mental
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Congress, two Senators who have seen family members with mental illness benefit from modern treatments are trying to improve access to care for others. Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico and Democrat Paul Wellstone of Minnesota have introduced a bill that would force employers to provide the same level of coverage for mental and physical illnesses. Although the bill would represent the most meager of advances--it would help only those well enough to work--its passage will still require a monumental lobbying effort. Business groups are already working against it, saying it's part of a liberal package...
Domenici and Wellstone point out that the legislation is a solid long-term investment, since it would help people get treated before their illnesses become so severe that they lose their jobs or hurt themselves. Even business lobbyists admit that the cost increases for mental-health insurance will be small (maybe 1%). But they fear it will open the door to other mandates as well. "You have to remember that the Patient's Bill of Rights is being considered too," says Kate Sullivan of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, referring to the proposal in Congress to make it easier...
Prospects for the mental-health bill look even weaker in the House than in the Senate, where Domenici chairs the influential budget committee. House majority whip Tom DeLay of Texas, who has close ties to business groups, was 1 of just 17 members of the House to vote against a very weak 1996 version of the Domenici-Wellstone proposal; he also seems to have a deep suspicion of psychology in general. Just last month, he accused the American Psychological Association of trying to "normalize pedophilia" after the association published a study suggesting that not all childhood victims of sexual abuse...
...DeLay's views on psychology are a bit harsh, many Americans have only in the past decade begun to see mental disorders as illnesses, not moral shortcomings. Though we still whisper about it, we all know a Tipper Gore at work today. Indeed, in addition to pushing her policy goals, Gore is hoping her own story will nourish this cultural shift. She and other reformers want to convince the nation that mental illness doesn't result from bad parenting or lax churchgoing but from chemical imbalances. In Gore's case, she says there was a problem with her brain...
Each state blundered differently. Washington State tied community mental-health spending to the size of welfare rolls, a sign of stigma itself. In Illinois, the state often paid nursing homes to take many of its patients. But old people and mentally ill people don't have the same needs, and few nursing homes hired the staff needed to treat the different set of patients. A bill before the Illinois legislature would require those hirings, but the efforts come too late for Russell Weston Jr. In 1996 he became an outpatient at an underfunded community mental-health center in Waterloo...