Senators Introduce Bipartisan Bill To Strengthen America’s Mental Health System

As part of a wide-ranging effort to address gun violence in the wake of December’s mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced the Excellence In Mental Health Act, legislation that aims to strengthen America’s mental health safety net by providing behavioral health care facilities more access to federal funding and consolidating disparate elements of the U.S. mental health safety net.

When introducing the legislation, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) explained, “[W]e must work together to spend federal dollars more wisely when treating people who are mentally ill. This bill will help address our fragmented mental health system and ensure that more patients have access to the care they need by offering current Community Mental Health Centers a chance to expand their services and obtain the Federally Qualified Community Behavioral Health Center designation.” Such a move would provide qualifying behavioral health centers parity with physical health centers by giving them access to prospective — rather than retrospective — Medicaid reimbursements. Modern Healthcare reports that the legislation would also require the federal health centers to offer more expansive services to mentally ill Americans and their families:

The new criteria established by the bill… would require such things as 24-hour crisis care, the increased integration of mental and substance abuse care with other kinds of medical care, as well as expanded support for families of mental health patients.

Mark Covall, president and CEO of the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems, said increased standardization and integration are both worthwhile goals (though the association doesn’t take an official stand on the bill). Whether it is adding mental health services to federally qualified health centers or adding medical care to mental health centers, integration is important because that is the direction the industry is moving toward, Covall said.

In its current iteration, the Excellence In Mental Health Act represents a solid step in the right direction when it comes to bridging the illogical gap between the ways that physical and behavioral health issues are treated in America. But while the increased funding provisions are good news, the bill still does not go quite as far as the Wellstone-Domenici Mental Health Parity And Addiction Equity Act, which would require most private insurers to treat mental health coverage the same way they treat any other coverage.

It is also encouraging that the bill includes mental health resources for veterans and substance abusers. Military suicides reached a record high in January, and substance abusers — as a group — are among the most likely to suffer from a co-occurring mental illness. Alongside Sen. Al Franken’s (R-MN) recently-introduced Mental Health In Schools Act — which encourages early intervention and community resources for mentally ill American children — the new legislation suggests that the Senate is serious about plugging the gaping holes in America’s mental health safety net.

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Obama to propose 1 percent pay hike for federal workers

President Obama will ask for a 1 percent pay raise for civilian federal workers in his 2014 budget, labor leaders briefed by the White House told CNN on Friday.

The Office of Management and Budget told federal labor unions that Obama will ask for a percentage increase in salaries in the next fiscal year.

“After all that federal workers have sacrificed the past three years, they have earned a raise,” said William R. Dougan, national president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, told the network. “I repeat, they have earned a raise. We are pleased to see the president take a bold stance and advocate for this badly-needed pay adjustment."

That raise would come on top of the half-point pay hike scheduled to take effect in late March, which has been delayed as part of the fiscal cliff deal struck last month. Federal salaries have been frozen since 2011. The Pentagon also announced plans to raise salaries by 1 percent earlier this week.

While union leaders agreed that it was nice to see the president fight for an increase, some voiced concern the raise was not sufficient.

“While the president’s proposal for a 1 percent pay increase for federal workers in 2014 is better than a pay freeze, I don’t feel like jumping and shouting for joy,” Carl Goldman, executive director of the AFSCME Council 26 told Government Executive.

“There are a number of unanswered questions concerning the proposal: Will there also be locality pay increases that reflect the higher cost of living in many areas? Will there be a raise in federal employees’ contributions to the health insurance program, which could have the net effect of a pay cut? It is difficult to know exactly how to react until these and similar questions are answered," he said.

The president's budget was due this week, but the White House missed the deadline to present the proposal to Congress. Any pay hike would still need to be approved by Congress.

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Colorado Committee Kills Bill Giving Legal Protections To Teaching Climate Change Denial And Creationism In Schools

By Jessica Goad

Earlier this week, a key legislative committee in Colorado voted down a bill that would give teachers at the state’s schools and colleges legal cover to teach the questioning of climate change and other subjects that “cause controversy” in the classroom.  The bill directed teachers to:

… create an environment that encourages students to intelligently and respectfully explore scientific questions and learn about scientific evidence related to biological and chemical evolution, global warming, and human cloning.

H.B. 13-1089 was sponsored by Rep. Stephen Humphrey (R) who explained:

This bill is not a curriculum change that would force educators to teach intelligent design or creationism.  It simply provides legal protections to those teachers who would like to provide their students with a complete education on both the strengths and weaknesses of these hotly debated scientific subjects.

The Colorado House Education Committee, of which Democrats are the majority, voted down the bill on a party line vote.

Colorado is not the only state to see such bills, even if their radical anti-science message did not gain traction there.  Legislators in five other states have introduced bills allowing teachers to deny evolution and climate change.  Interestingly, they all bear resemblance to “model” legislation that has been promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative corporate front-group that puts together draft bills for use by state legislators.

In the past, ALEC has drafted model bills such as the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act,” which requires teachers to “encourage an atmosphere of respect for different opinions and open-mindedness to new ideas.”  ALEC has also been behind bills that block putting a price on carbon, turn over public lands to states and private companies, and roll back state renewable electricity standards.  One of the co-sponsors of the bill in the Colorado Senate is a dues-paying member of ALEC.

The Heartland Institute, an extremist group that once compared people who believe in global warming to the Unabomber, has also been linked to these types of bills.  Heartland is still a member of the ALEC task force that originally wrote the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, and is also designing climate-denial curriculum.

The fight over teaching climate change denial in schools has just begun.  As Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education put it:

This victory in Colorado was too close. People in Colorado and elsewhere need to understand that these bills would be nothing but trouble: scientifically misleading, pedagogically unnecessary, and likely to produce administrative, legal, and economic headaches.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Center for the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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Republicans Blame Video Games, Not Guns, For Gun Violence

Republicans are more likely to place the blame for gun violence on video games, not guns, according to a recent poll from Public Policy Polling. Sixty seven percent of Republicans believe that such games are a “bigger safety threat” than firearms — only 14 percent think the reverse.

The only problem? There’s no data to support that position. There is evidence that limiting access to guns can help limit violence wrought by those machines. In particular, there’s evidence to show that the Assault Weapons Ban helped to limit gun violence on the Mexican-American border. And in states where gun ownership is high and gun laws are lax, violence rates are higher.

On the other hand, there’s absolutely no conclusive evidence showing that video games are the root cause of violence. There are countries with much lower rates of violence that have much higher consumption of video games.

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AHCA CEO: No Solutions From Government

 Highlight transcript below to create clipTranscript:  Print  |  Email Go  Click text to jump within videoThu 07 Feb 13 | 05:30 AM ET Gov. Mark Parkinson, CEO of The American Health Care Association, tells CNBC that thanks to ever-increasing political partisanship, solutions to America's economic problems won't come from Washington.

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California Democrats Propose Strictest Gun Regulations In The Nation

California Democrats present gun violence prevention plan.

Thursday afternoon, a group of California Senate Democrats rolled out a legislative package that would create what would likely be the tightest gun regulation system in the nation, ranging from sweeping prohibitions on semi-automatic rifles to restrictions on guns in the home. The proposal consists of ten points:

1. Ban all semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines. California’s assault weapons ban only restricts the possession of semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines if they have an additional, “military-style” feature like flash suppressors. The new laws would tighten this law by banning all such rifles regardless of external features.

2. Ban possession of high-capacity magazines. California law bans the transfer, not possession, of magazines that can hold over ten bullets. This allows people wanting to skirt the law to buy the constituent parts and make the magazines themselves. The new law would close that loophole.

3. Ban “bullet button” conversion kits. State law defines “detachable magazines” as, in part, magazines that can be released “without the use of a tool.” Bullet button kits allow magazines to be released quickly by pressing a bullet into them, thus creating an end-around the intent of the assault weapons ban. The new provisions would ban such kits.

4. Bans shotgun-rifle combinations. It would ban this class of class of weapon.

5. Universal registration of all guns. The law would create “ownership records consistently across-the-board, ensuring all firearms are recorded” so that the background check system can prevent criminals from getting guns.

6. Background checks on ammunition. This provision requires a “full and complete” background check on ammunition sales, “building on” laws existing in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

7. Regulating gun loans. The legislators propose setting up an as-yet undefined regulatory system for the loan, as opposed to sale, of guns.

8. Prevent prohibited individuals from living in homes with guns. California’s Armed Persons Prohibition (APP) database lists people who can’t legally own weapons (as a consequence of criminal or mental health records) under state law. This addition would prevent people on the list from living in a house that has a gun.

9. Cracking down on people who can’t own guns legally but do anyway. Currently, 19,700 people who are on the APP list own guns. Police estimate that these people own roughly 39,000 firearms. This new law would authorize additional funding to enforce the law in this area.

10. Required safety training for handgun owners. People with concealed carry permits are required under California (and many other) state laws to pass a mandatory safety and firearm instruction course. This provision would require all handgun owners, regardless of permit status, to undergo a similar process.

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Hey Fairfax County, High School Seniors Can Handle ‘Beloved,’ And Learn About Racism and Sexism

Laura Murphy, whose son is a senior in high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, doesn’t think he—or anyone else—should be reading Beloved in their English classes, and she’s on a quest to get it bumped from the curriculum. Per Raw Story:

“I’m not some crazy book burner,” Murphy, a mother of four, insisted to the Post. “I have great respect and admiration for our Fairfax County educators. The school system is second to none. But I disagree with the administration at a policy level.”

In spite of the awards and accolades won by Beloved and its author, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Murphy feels that the book’s theme of the brutality of slavery and scenes depicting gang rape, infant murder and violence are too intense for high school seniors. She said her son had nightmares when he had to read the book for his senior English course.

“It’s not about the author or the awards,” said Murphy. “It’s about the content.” On Thursday, the Fairfax County School Board voted not to hear Murphy’s challenge to the book. She now plans to take her fight to the Virginia Board of Education.

The thing about sending your children to public school is that you’re consenting to give up a certain amount of control over what they’re exposed to, because one of the major points of public schools is to make sure students have a pre-established set of skills and cultural references in common. And that often means teaching children things that their parents don’t know, or giving them access to literature and history that their parents might not have at home, or frankly, might not want them to read or learn about. It also, on an emotional level, means letting your children come into contact with ideas and art that will expand their sense of the world.

An associated risk of that is that they might be upset by some of the things they learn about the world. Racism is frightening. So is sexual assault. But both of those things have happened in the United States, and for many people, continue to be major factors that affect their day-to-day life. And I think high school seniors, especially those who will be going off to colleges where they have much more sexual autonomy, and will be dealing with larger and more diverse peer groups, not only are old enough to understand the reality of those facts and to be confronted with the emotional impacts they have, but really ought to be confronted by them. I’m not a parent yet, but my understanding is that parenting is a balance between protecting children from things they genuinely don’t have the capacity to process—Wu-Tang may be for the children, but I’m not sure Toni Morrison is—and helping them process the difficult things they have the moral and emotional ability to confront, even if that involves hard work on your, and their parts.

If Murphy’s son is having nightmares about slavery and gang rape, that actually seems to suggest that he’s pretty attuned to the emotional horror of racial and sexual violence. Maybe, instead of trying to protect him from those feelings, she could find some way for him to channel them into productive anti-racist or anti-sexist work. That would be much better college prep (and resume-building) for him than trying to save him, and other seniors, from being upset. I doubt Murphy is going to have much luck with the Virginia Board of Education. And she’ll have much less with whatever institution of higher learning he heads off to.

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Oncolytics rises on new cancer drug data

NEW YORK -- Shares of Oncolytics Biotech Inc. jumped Friday after the company said its drug Reolysin shrunk the tumors of almost all the patients in a small clinical trial.

The company said 20 patients were treated with Reolysin and two chemotherapy drugs, and 19 of them had smaller tumors after treatment. On average their tumors shrank by about a third. The patients in the mid-stage trial had squamous cell carcinoma, a type of lung cancer, and their disease had metastasized or returned after previous treatment.

Oncolytics shares rose $1.28, or 35.9 percent, to $4.85 in morning trading.

Reolysin is based on a common virus called the respiratory enteric orphan virus, or reovirus. Oncolytics says most adults have been exposed to the virus and it usually has no symptoms. Reolysin is designed to infect and destroy cancer cells. The company says the body's immune response stops the reovirus from replicating in healthy cells, but in cancer cells with specific mutations, the antiviral response is not effective. The virus multiplies and the cell dies.

On Dec. 13, the Canadian drugmaker said Reolysin met its goal in a late-stage trial that evaluated the drug as a treatment for head and neck cancers. In January the company reported positive results for Reolysin as a treatment for colorectal cancer. Shares of Oncolytics are up 64.5 percent since then.

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World Famous Neurosurgeon Calls for Market-Oriented Health Care Reform In Front of Obama; Will Media Report?

At his keynote speech at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, world-renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson laid out some ideas he had for improving health care in the United States of America. Seated to his right was the president of the United States, who appeared to not care much for the good doctor's market-oriented idea of tax-free Health Savings Accounts. [h/t email tipster Brian Plunkett for bringing this to my attention]

The Insurance & Financial Advisor website has more details (emphases mine; video embedded below):

During his remarks, Carson came up with several solutions to some of America’s most pressing problems, including focusing on the importance of education.

Carson also touched on the economy, saying that he thinks about the issue frequently. “We don’t want to go down the path of many failed nations,” he said, pointing out what he says is “fiscal irresponsibility” in our government.

He seemed to offer the idea of a flat 10% income tax, which would prevent many successful people from taxing their money oversees [sic]. He cited “602 banks in the Cayman Islands” created as havens for those seeking to escape high taxes.

“That money needs to be back here building our infrastructure and creating jobs,” he said.

Carson’s remarks regarding what appeared to be his alternative to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) appeared to make the president uncomfortable at times, with Obama looking down and away as Carson began to describe specific suggestions.

ACA is President Obama’s landmark health reform legislation that was passed in 2010. Carson has spoken openly in the past about alternatives to the law.

“We spend a lot of money on health care, twice as much per capita as anyone else in the world, and yet not very efficient. What can we do?” Carson asked rhetorically. “Here’s my solution. When a person is born, give them a birth certificate, an electronic medical record and a health savings account [HSA] to which money can be contributed pre-tax from the time you’re born to the time you die.”

Carson went on to say that accounts should be passed on to family members, so “there’s nobody talking about death panels,” in an obvious reference to the much debated “panels” discussed during negotiations and after passage of ACA.

Regarding those who cannot afford health insurance, Carson suggested, “We can make contributions to their HSA each month,” he said, adding, “we already have this huge pot of money; instead of sending it to some bureaucracy let’s put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care.”

Although Dr. Carson is a devout Christian, it appears there were no remarks made by Dr. Carson that were critical of the president's contraception mandate. That being said, it is gutsy to offer comments in a public forum which don't square with the president's left-wing agenda on health care, even though Carson did so respectfully and without any partisan invective.

All the same, don't expect the media to note Carson's ideas, which are fundamentally about empowering the individual and not the government.

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Major Networks Ignore News of Increased Costs of ObamaCare

For two nights in a row, NBC, ABC, and CBS have ignored a story that would damage the liberal narrative they are helping the White House to push. Two days ago, the Congressional Budget Office reported that it has revised its projections of the cost of ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies. The CBO now estimates that the subsidies, which are to be offered through exchanges beginning in 2014, will cost 29 percent more than the CBO initially projected in 2010. The projected 10-year cost has increased by $233 billion.

In addition, the report estimates that 7 million workers will lose their employer-sponsored health insurance due to ObamaCare, almost twice as many as the CBO previously estimated. Monetary penalties on those who don’t buy insurance are now expected to be $36 billion higher from 2014 to 2019 than was originally thought.

Ominous news, to be sure. But the three major networks could not be bothered to mention it at all on the Tuesday or Wednesday editions of their evening news programs. NBC Nightly News had more important things to discuss, like Chris Christie’s weight, the new Monopoly game piece, and the 2014 Winter Olympics, which are still a year away, but will be telecast on the networks of NBC Universal. Of course, they also found time to talk about the continuing effort to coerce the Boy Scouts into accepting gay members.

ABC World News also covered Chris Christie’s weight, the new Monopoly piece, and the crusade to allow openly-gay Boy Scouts and scout leaders. In addition, they found time for an update on Barbara Walters’ recovery from chicken pox and a story on the youngest female billionaire in the U.S. (she owns In-N-Out Burger).

Why let the image of ObamaCare, hailed in the media as the president’s crowning achievement, be tarnished with critical news about its negative consequences?

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