Well, like so many Americans,
my family and my friends have faced mental health challenges.
And so, you know, I think that there's very few families
and very few workplaces or communities that can't say that.
And I think one of the things that I've seen is even as we've made
advances in the ability to treat mental health,
the actual delivery of that treatment,
the affordability and the accessibility has often lagged behind.
And so one of the things I've been really focused on is trying to make sure
that insurers, that providers are actually delivering on mental health care.
When I moved to Orange County ten years ago,
there were no pediatric mental health beds in the entire county.
And as I said, you might think, well, it's just a county.
Orange County is bigger than like 20 some states.
And yet we had no pediatric mental health beds.
And so although that's changed with the leadership of our children's
hospital over time, it really goes to show you how difficult it is
to be able to find mental health care as well as afford it.
And so when I talk about people being healthy,
I mean healthy in every aspect of their lives.
Both physical and mental health.
Well, talking to different people about their experiences, one of the great
things about being a congressperson is people share their life stories with you.
They share their frustrations with you.
And I think one of the amazing things that we've seen the disability community
do over my lifetime, as I was born in the era of the ADA.
I grew up in Iowa.
Tom Harkin was my senator
and I can remember what it was a big deal it was to have the ADA pass.
As we've seen the stigma reduced and more and more people feel like
they can talk about their frustrations and their challenges,
what they could accomplish, what they couldn't
get in terms of wellness and what they often are falling short on.
And so I started talking to different people.
I started looking at things.
You know talking to psychiatrists in our community, psychologists, social
workers, schools, teachers, and hearing about their challenges.
And so I think that's really part of being a representative, is that learning part.
Learning what the problems are in your community
and then teaching other people about them to create that momentum to fix them.
There are real lessons to be drawn from the successes of the ADA,
from the successes of the advocacy of the disability community
and those who support the disability community have done, which is that
allowing every American, regardless of their different abilities
to achieve their potential, is a great thing for our economy.
In fact, when we design inclusive things, not only do we create opportunity
for people with disabilities to contribute to our economy,
to contribute their talents and their passions to our society.
But often designing things from an inclusive perspective
creates a better outcome for everybody.
And so I heard a lot about this exact thing
when I chaired my hearing this fall
on the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee on Natural Resources.
I was really interested in the topic of the accessibility of public lands,
and I mean the
accessibility to a lot of different ways, including the cost of getting there,
the transportation issues where we locate these public lands in terms of
environmental justice.
But I also meant very particularly
the accessibility for the disability community.
And here's what I learned.
Good trail design that helps people
with physical disabilities is also the right
kind of trail design to prevent erosion and ensure conservation.
And so in addition to making these trails more accessible
for people who, for example, may use wheelchairs, may use different kinds
of walking assistance or mobility assistance,
you also make those trails easier for people who use strollers and have kids
or people who are seniors who may have balance challenges.
And so the result is more people in our national parks,
more people on our public lands.
And that is good both for our souls, for our spirits,
but also for our economy and those rural communities around the public lands.
So I think it's just a false idea that sometimes gets pushed out
by corporations or by the business community that accomodating
every American to the extent possible, is somehow a burden or an expense.
To the contrary, it is a benefit and it is a privilege
that we are able in our country to welcome everybody into these institutions and
organizations. As a
single mom of three kids who
is by myself when I have little kids and trying to navigate,
you know, a lot of the things that our people may
think of in a strict legal sense as sort of accommodations
for the disability community also maybe those trails
and those experiences possible for me.
So a great example here is designing picnic tables
that accommodate wheelchairs.
Those same picnic tables also accommodate high chairs
and accommodate people who need different kinds of seating
and different kinds of support when they sit.
So I think there's a lot of inclusive design principle
that we ought to be bringing to everything
and recognizing too, that the disability community
and people with disabilities, it's not just one kind of disability
and the kinds of technological systems and what's possible
for people is going to change over time.
So the more inclusive we can be in those design principles
we're offering going to better be better
at achieving our goals and set ourselves up for the future,
which I hope will continue to see more options and more possibilities
for people with disabilities to fully participate.
One of the things we've seen is, for example, with housing for our military,
my teacher, Senator Warren, was pushing to make sure that we're building more
military housing, that it can accommodate people with disabilities.
But if we were designing these houses with a visitability
lens, like you said, we would build them all that way.
And that means as the population of people with disabilities goes up and down,
we don't run into these shortages
and these blockages because we've designed it
so that it's appropriate for everybody right from the start.
Orange County, California, really boomed in sort of the seventies
and the eighties and the nineties, and a lot of those folks now are aging.
So in the district that I represent,
California's 45th District, we have an aging population.
We're also home to the second largest retirement community in the United States.
Laguna Woods.
Many of us now at different points in our life, will benefit from
from different kinds of accommodations.
And so that's why I think about
accommodating disabilities, not as something that we do
just for people with disabilities, but it's something we do for all of us.
We all benefit from having people with disabilities in
and among places, and we also all benefit from those universal design principles,
often at different points in our lives.
People with disabilities often face special health care needs,
but what they get on the health care system is distinctly unfair treatment.
And we see this in a lot of different ways, everything
from denial of organ transplants
to very, very difficult, arduous arguments about
what is and is not medically necessary for people with disabilities.
So I've been working across the aisle to address some of these issues
and I'm really grateful
for the disability community in helping me understand these challenges
and raise them.
So for example, with my colleague Jamie Herrera Butler, a representative
Republican from Washington, we have introduced the Charlotte Woodward
Organ Transplant Discrimination Prevention Act,
and it would end blatant discrimination in organ donation
against people with disabilities, which is often based on perceived years
of life, years of quality life in ways that are really unfair
to people with disabilities.
We've also been working on making sure that we preserve
the tax deduction for extraordinary medical expenses.
That is a big issue.
People with disabilities, particularly if they're facing any kind of surgery
or procedure to continue to treat their disability
throughout their lifetime, making sure that we preserve that tax deduction.
And then also looking at what insurers are doing.
And for me, this started with a real interest in mental health parity,
the promise that insurers
that treat mental health and physical health the same.
They do not.
They break that promise year after year.
So I passed a bill to help crack down on insurers,
and that got me interested in how insurers define medical necessity
and the way that they do this with regard to things like
wheelchairs, assistive
devices, prostheses is really, really problematic.
And so it's often very, very biased against the disability community
and prevents them from being as healthy as they could be.
I've written to the Biden administration and asked them to issue better guidance
to insurance companies on what they mean by medical necessity to police insurers.
What we should not be putting it on patients and consumers
to be able to go to battle with these huge insurance companies with big insurance
that is the job of the government to fairly enforce the law and to look behind
what may seem like a vacuous definitions of medical necessity and see how in
real life they are discriminating against people with disabilities.
Yeah, look, healthy air, clean water, being able to be healthy in
your environment is something that's important for all Americans.
But it is particularly important for people who may be struggling with
lung disease, maybe have more difficult to treat conditions.
And so I think this is an issue about equity.
It's an issue of justice.
And we know that certain communities as well, lower income
communities, communities of color of long than the repository of pollution.
And so I think it's important that we begin that transition to green energy,
that we see it as something that we're doing both for our health,
for our planet, but also for our economic competitiveness.
So many of our competitor countries, including China,
are investing much more in green energy than we are.
And part of the reason they're doing that is they understand that the economy
that has the manufacturing jobs for the next century
will be the country that figures out how to manufacture in a clean way.
And it's the same thing in terms of thinking about housing shortage,
which is a big issue here in California.
How can we build more housing?
Part of that is thinking about how can we build housing in a very green way
that minimizes the harms on the environment, that lets us
put more dense housing without harming our environment.
I think one of the things that's really, really important as an elected official
is to be honest with the American people.
And that means really pushing some of these fossil fuel companies-
to push against what we call greenwashing, which is, you know, when they
when they say that they're all about clean energy transition
and yet they continue behind the scenes to spend
millions and millions of dollars lobbying against clean energy initiatives.
So I think that's really important, not just to ask,
do you support clean energy?
You know, do you like polar bears?
Everybody's going to say yes.
But really to say, what action will you take to put behind your words?
So you know if I had asked when you think back to the conversation
I had with the CDC director about free COVID testing,
if I had asked him, do you think that, you know,
anyone should not get a COVID test because they're worried about the expense?
He would have said, Oh, of course not.
I think everybody should get a COVID test who needs one.
But that doesn't mean that everyone will be able to get one.
And so you really have to push toward what is the action
that you're going to be able to connect this to.
So if you're testifying before me and you're saying that you believe
climate change is real and you think it's an existential threat,
I need to hear, the American people need to hear,
the people of this world need to hear, what are you doing?
What are you doing to reduce emissions?
What are you doing to change your business model?
What are you doing to make a difference?
And it needs to be meaningful and real.
It can't be empty words.