Mental Health Illnesses now covered by Health Insurance

In April 1996, Sen. Pete Domenici stood on the floor of the Senate and told colleagues "now is the time" to pass legislation requiring insurance companies to cover mental illnesses just like other medical conditions.

More than 12 years and numerous setbacks later, that legislation is finally becoming law, tucked into the administration's $700 billion rescue package.

This success marks the end of an odyssey for Mr. Domenici, for whom the bill is named. It is also an insight into how the business of politics can be intensely personal.

The New Mexico Republican started his quest after his daughter Clare, one of his eight children, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. After 35 years in the Senate, Mr. Domenici, 76 years old, is retiring after being diagnosed with an incurable, degenerative brain disease.

Mr. Domenici's original partner in the mental-health effort, Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, died in a plane crash in 2002. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the Democrat who took up the cause after Mr. Wellstone's death, is battling brain cancer and wasn't in the Senate for the final vote on the bill.

"Happy is not quite the right word," Mr. Domenici said Thursday as it appeared the legislation would become law. "I'm glad that we're finished, but it's been such a long ordeal."

In the 1980s, Mr. Domenici began spending time with other parents of people with mental illness. He heard stories of financial ruin that resulted from a lack of insurance coverage. Though they were better off, Mr. Domenici and his wife Nancy "had to pay a lot of money" for their daughter's care, Mr. Domenici remembers. At some points, the Medicaid health program for the poor covered Clare's care as an adult, he says.

Mr. Domenici's memory sometimes fails him now. But he recalls a speech from 1996, when he sought to attach the measure to a health-insurance bill. "You could feel the Senate just throbbing when I was down there giving a speech, about a great country being so far off on mental illness that it's pathetic...like we had no brains," Mr. Domenici said.

Mr. Domenici and Mr. Wellstone won that Senate vote in 1996. But their provision dropped out of the legislation after negotiations with the House, with opposition from insurance companies and their allies in Congress blocking the effort. The two men squeezed a pared-down version into a spending bill later that year that "dramatically reduced our expectations and our hopes," Mr. Domenici said at the time.

The fight stalled for years largely because of opposition from Republicans who controlled the House.

In 2002, after Messrs. Domenici and Wellstone reintroduced their legislation, President George W. Bush came to Albuquerque and endorsed the concept in a speech. In a private conversation, Mr. Bush told Mr. Domenici, "You don't have to talk me into the fact that mental illness is a disease like any other sickness," Mr. Domenici and the White House say.

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