Iowa Democrats see Clinton as ‘champion’ on mental health care

CEDAR RAPIDS - Hillary Clinton 'hit a home run” with her plan to integrate mental and physical health care and enhance community-based treatment opportunities, according to an Iowa lawmaker on the front-line of those issues.

'She covered all the bases,” Senate President Pam Jochum, D-Dubuque, told reporters Tuesday on a conference organized by Hillary for Iowa. 'It's one of the many reasons I decided to support Hillary.”

Nearly 20 percent of American adults, 40 million people, have mental health issues, according to the campaign. In Iowa, that includes about 392,000 and one in nine children, Jochum said.

The problem is particularly acute in Iowa, she said, because of Gov. Terry Branstad's 'unilateral decision to gut mental health system and privatize Medicaid.”

'There just is nowhere for many of these people to get the treatment they need,” Jochum said. 'The closure of these facilities without a clear plan to fill the gap is symptomatic of a much broader lack of support for mental health.

That prompted a response from the Branstad administration, which said 'facts aren't getting in the way of fiction from Sen. Jochum.”

The facts are, Branstad spokesman Ben Hammes said, that Jochum voted three times to close two of the state's mental health institutions since 2009, there are more than 100 mental health beds currently available across the state and Branstad has signed more than $310 million in mental health funding since returning to office in 2011.

'The fact is, the Iowa Health and Wellness Plan provides mental health care to 150,000 more Iowans today that did not have coverage before,” Hammes said. 'The fact is, Iowans have more access to mental health care than ever before in a community based setting, which experts agree, is better for the patient.”

However, mental health advocate Jennifer Herrington of Clarinda, said Clinton's plan takes into account concerns she heard from Iowa's during her listening tour in April 2015.

'We talked a lot of issues, but what struck me was how frequently the conversation turned back to mental health,” she said on the call. 'Hillary knew all about the global, national, big picture issues related to mental health and then was very in tune with what was happening here in Iowa.

'She was able to connect all those dots … substance abuse, the social determinants of health, trauma, access, how all of those things compound challenges for people with serious mental illness,” Herrington said. She's our champion.”

Clinton's plan calls for integrating mental and physical health care and increasing community-based treatment opportunities; promoting early diagnosis and intervention; enforcing current mental health parity laws; train law enforcement to deal with people with mental health issues; and invest in brain and behavioral research.

She didn't include a price tag.