SENATE BILL: ...Mental Health Reform Act of 2013 (Failed)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I am reluctant to go to two posts on this bill, but I am not going to sacrifice quality in order to attain that. I will see about condensing it somewhat, though.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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Sponsor Feedback: Origination
Status: Senators have 24 hours to object to the adoption of the amendment above.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The amendment has been adopted.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Amendment 56:42 by NC Yankee (see above )

Sponsor Feedback: Origination
Status: Senators have 24 hours to object.


Going to motion for UC when that is finished and wrap this up.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The amendment has been adopted.


Senators have 24 hours to object to the suspension of the rules and proceeding immediately to a final vote.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Seeing no objection the rules are suspended and a final vote has begun, Senators please vote Aye, Nay or Abstain.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

AYE!!!

[Napoleon]

Aye

[TNF]

Aye

[Sbane]

Aye

[Gass3268]

Aye

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

Aye

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Vote on Final Passage of the "Duke-Yankee 'Crazy on You' Mental Health Reform Act of 2013":

Aye (6): Gass3268, Napoleon, NC Yankee, Polnut, sbane and TNF
Nay (0):
Abstain (0):

Didn't Vote (4): Bore, HagridofthDeep, MaxQue and TJ in Cleve

With six votes in the affirmation, the bill has been passed and is presented to the President for executive action.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

Light at the end of the tunnel!

[MaxQue]

Aye ftr.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

First off it came to the floor in early May, not April: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=172931.msg3714109#msg3714109

That was a misprint on the noticeboard because my connection got crashed I as was updating the page and because there was no amendment votes, it didn't get fixed for a while.

I must say this is rather ridiculous. I started with a blank page. I had Senators bitching because "OMG this is has no text, is this going to go anywhere". I put this damn thing together piece by piece over three months, often times begging to get feedback from Seantors, trying to find out where people were.

I also find it insulting, that you have contacted "numerous" Senators, but not myself. No one has sent me a damn thing on this, especailly not you Mr. President. You stated support for this on three different occassions, as Senator and then as President and never gave a hint of problems with this.

This wasn't the Education bill, this starting as nothing and was built up slowly. There is no excuse behind 1) Not understanding the justification or 2) Not being able to wrap there heads around the content. I must say this is pure bull sh**t, Mr. President. I made the case for each section, each segment was based on research brought before this Senate and is justified by a real situation and wasn't thrown at you all at once. So not only is there no excuse for not wrapping their head around the text, there is also no excuse for not understanding the jsutifications for each section.

This only seven pages long, the damn Education bill was twelve, twelve pages before people pulled the plug. And if you were so worried about costs, then you could have just struck out the damn portion with the facility expansion, which I have three times scaled back to reign in costs, spread across several years to avoid an impact on the budget. If their were more concerns you should have said something Mr. President.

I must say this is most baseless and false justification for a veto I have ever seen and I request and override.

No accessible to most of us? Give me a ing break, if this was not accessbile, then frankly we should consider abolishing the ing Senate because obviously we have so reduced our standards to the point where we cannot be ing bothered to read through five to six pages, over the course of three months, then we cannot do anything substantial.

[DemPGH]

And I completely concur with Nix on this. It seems to me a massive expenditure of money and for what I'm not terribly certain. I mentioned that I can see an anti-cancer bill or anti-cancer research getting caught up in some of these things, but I'm not sure that all of these bills necessarily need to become end-all-be-all measures or treatises, surely this one.

Perhaps with something like this one way to deal with it would be to break it down to something that can be handled and then deal with residual items in amendments or subsequent legislation. I think this bill could have achieved more while being less, so to speak.

[Ban my account ffs!]

While your frustration is understandable, Yankee... this does not mean the end for mental health reform.  Take it back, work with the president, and do it again.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Please calm down, Yankee. Your reaction is not a surprise to me, and to be brutally honest, I suspect that may be why Senators who otherwise might have expressed concerns with the direction of this bill earlier failed to speak up. There's no good reason to hurl insults or to accuse me of dishonesty.

That is ridiculous. For one thing, 90% of the time I lose my temper is an intentional choice to arrive at a desired effect, usually to illustrate the absurdity of what someone is doing and almost always is justified and some times even beneficiall. Second of all, I welcomed and stated a bazillion times that I desired and wanted outside feedback. Don't you dare turn this around on me. I didn't accuse you of dishonesty, I said you had said on three different occassions that you supported this and didn't say a word of issue or complaint at any time to let me know that we needed to fix some things. Of course while we are on the subject, did you not agree with my that the "silent opposition" was horrible and did you not criticize the way people treat each other just before you not once, but twice blind sided me with something? I never said were dishonest, but apparently you seem to think there are grounds to be accused of such on.

I didn't contact you about this because you have explained the necessity for this several times over the course of this debate. I read those explanations, and then I re-read them. They failed to provide me with an understanding of what was going on. I went to other Senators hoping that they could assist me. They could not. I understand that some people are comfortable voting for legislation that they don't entirely understand. Others are not comfortable voting against legislation that they don't understand. I do not belong to either category. Unless a bill is comprehensible to me, I will default to opposing it.

Don't you think it would be helpful to you know state that then, so I can try a different approach?

As I said, I wanted to amend this and I even attempted to do so before giving up because I can't make any sense of the bill itself. The only reason why I failed to voice my concerns earlier was that I hadn't realized that this was anywhere near a final vote. I also made the erroneous assumption that other Senators would speak up about its kudzu-like growth before that happened.

I listed over and over again my stated objectives and once they were complete, it was rather obvious that I would be going for a vote. I then motioned for UC and gave 24 hours for people to speak up on lingering problems or concerns.

Every section of this bill deals with a real concern on the issue of mental heath. I added detail to improve functionaly. I parsed through it several times to ensure that everything worked, removed various problems and cut several billion dollars to the point that the facility expansion is now around 40% of what is actually needed to fix the gap, all in the last amendment.

I stated I was concerned about the length of the bill and wanted to avoid two posts if possible, but I would not sacrifice the quality of the bill for an issue of quantity and it came down to a question of amputating arms and limbs to get it down to size and I wasn't going to do that.

While your frustration is understandable, Yankee... this does not mean the end for mental health reform.  Take it back, work with the president, and do it again.

And do what differently?

Do we ignore stigmatization? The lack of facilities? Essential research in critical areas? Integration with Fritzcare? Support for the dependents? Utilizing Electronic Medical Records so that the children don't fall through the cracks of the system as they become adults?

Comprehensive bills often lead to problems, but when they work there is no excuse for crashing them just because they are comprehensive out of some knee jerk opposition to the model.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

And I completely concur with Nix on this. It seems to me a massive expenditure of money and for what I'm not terribly certain. I mentioned that I can see an anti-cancer bill or anti-cancer research getting caught up in some of these things, but I'm not sure that all of these bills necessarily need to become end-all-be-all measures or treatises, surely this one.

Perhaps with something like this one way to deal with it would be to break it down to something that can be handled and then deal with residual items in amendments or subsequent legislation. I think this bill could have achieved more while being less, so to speak.

Then wouldn't it be easier to pass the bill and amend it later. Especially since the largest ticket item is spread across five years adn thus gives us ample time to resolve the issue of cost?