In the News

WASHINGTON – Majority Whip Tom Emmer today joined GMA3 to discuss his bill, the Securing Facilities for Mental Health Services Act. This legislation removes a barrier that prohibits psychiatric hospitals from applying for mortgage assistance, allowing mental health care facilities to expand and address our nation’s patient bed shortage.

Click here or above to watch the full interview.

Whip Emmer on how this bill expands mental health care:

“We have a mental health crisis in this country, and we have a shortage of care facilities, beds if you will, for people with mental health challenges. In fact, the NIH did a 2021 study, DeMarco, which said that we are off by about 40 percent. What this bill does is it would allow mental health hospitals and other facilities to apply for federal hospital mortgage insurance. In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which had Section 242 in it to incent people to build hospitals and expand hospitals. They created this federal hospital mortgage insurance, but they excluded mental health facilities. What we are trying to do is to correct that because we have got this severe shortage. The longer we don’t deal with it, you probably know, we are pushing people with serious mental health issues into homeless centers, into hospital emergency rooms, and worse yet, into our jails.”

Whip Emmer on how this bill addresses the country’s mental health crisis:

“If you think about it, when you're sending someone who has a significant mental health crisis back out onto the street, if they were initially seen in an emergency room and we are sending them back out onto the street, it is just a matter of time before they harm themselves or perhaps worse yet others, and they may end up in the legal system. We need to treat the condition. This is no different than having a broken leg. People have mental health challenges that we can treat. We want to be able to treat them in an extended setting, inpatient mental health facilities, so that we can return them to productive members of society. I think that should be everyone’s goal.”

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