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Recovery in the News
Lawmakers pave road to recovery with legislation
Richard CloughChicago Tribune
September 21, 2006
WASHINGTON - When seeking help for an addiction that nearly cost him his political career, Rep. Patrick Kennedy found a non-drinking buddy just across the aisle.
Kennedy, a Democrat from Rhode Island, found not only a fast friend in Rep. Jim Ramstad, a Minnesota Republican and recovering alcoholic. He also found a legislative co-sponsor as the two try to translate their struggles into a law benefiting all addicts.
They announced Thursday that they are pushing the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act, which would put health insurance coverage for addiction treatment on a par with treatment of chronic diseases.
They hope their willingness to share their addictions will give new impetus to legislation that has been languishing in Congress in one form or another for five years.
"I have an addiction, I have a mental illness," Kennedy reporters Thursday as Ramstad stood nearby.
After a car crash in May led Kennedy to check himself into a rehabilitation clinic for an addiction to painkillers, the 39-year-old son of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., began his journey to recovery, with Ramstad, 60, as his sponsor. Since he got sober 25 years ago, Ramstad said, he has led legislative efforts to "reduce the stigma" of admitting to and seeking help for chemical dependency.
He co-chairs the House Addiction, Treatment and Recovery Caucus with Kennedy.
Ramstad candidly discusses his troubled past to warn of the dangers of alcohol and laud the benefits of treatment.
"I don't want to go back to that jail cell where I woke up on July 31, 1981, as a result of my last alcoholic blackout," Ramstad said. Ramstad and Kennedy have teamed with the Betty Ford Center and the Caron Treatment Centers to push the bill named for Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Democrat from Minnesota who died in a plane crash in 2002. The bill has 228 co-sponsors in the House but has been scheduled for a floor vote.
Douglas Tieman, CEO of the Caron centers, said getting insurance coverage for addiction treatment has been increasingly difficult since the early 1990s, when a health care overhaul siphoned money away from mental health treatment.
It has been difficult to lobby for coverage, he said, because addicts are widely dispersed and have no organized group to represent them. And addicts, he said, often have a more difficult time seeking help than those with chronic diseases, in part because addiction is often seen as a consequence of personal choices rather than a disease.
"The person who drives too fast and gets in an accident, we don't leave them on the side of the road, bleeding," Tieman said, adding that addicts do not choose to become addicted.
Since the mid-1960s, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have categorized alcoholism as a disease.
Wellstone championed mental health parity throughout the 1990s, and he first introduced an equitable-treatment bill in 2001, along with Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico. The current Senate bill has 69 co-sponsors.
Kennedy and Ramstad introduced their version of the House bill last year.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune