Find Your Local NAMI
Go
Call the NAMI Helpline at
Or text "HelpLine" to 62640
Donate Now
Email: media@nami.org
For all other marketing and communications needs and requests, please contact marcom@nami.org
A handful of states are considering pooling their purchasing power to negotiate lower prices from pharmaceutical companies for medications in Medicaid. While our organizations understand that states must make tough decisions in the face of the current budget crisis, these programs will jeopardize consumer health if they restrict access to needed medications.
The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) fully supports the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act of 2003. We are grateful for the leadership of Senators Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) and Representatives Jim Ramstad (R-MN) and Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) in seeking to end discriminatory health insurance coverage for children and adults with severe mental illnesses and their families.
As President Bush’s “New Freedom” Commission on Mental Health moves toward release of its final report in April 2003, the NLGA is seeking to rally public awareness of the need to improve the lives of people with mental illnesses.
Of the 24 states that have restricted access to medications in their Medicaid program, only ten have taken steps to protect psychotropic medications. Restrictions on access to psychotropic medications not only jeopardize consumer health, they also fail to reduce health care costs over the long run.
Richard T. (Dick) Greer, 76, who in the 1980s helped spearhead the drive to refocus the federal government’s research efforts toward the biological basis for mental illnesses and to increase research funding and community services, died of acute leukemia on January 13, 2003 at his Arlington, Virginia home.