From the time she was 8 years old, Linda Lingle has been living with her mother's mental illness. Lingle talks of mother’s
mental illnessShe backs a bill requiring insurance
coverage of some mental disordersBy Crystal Kua
ckua@starbulletin.comSo as Gov. Lingle listened yesterday to a man describe his successes treating his severe depression and other accounts of people coping with mental illness, the stories hit close to home.
"As I hear the testimony of the man talking about washing his hands over and over, I've seen it up close. Listening to the mother talk about her daughter all of a sudden become a different person, it's like listening to my father talk about my mother," Lingle told the Senate Health Committee yesterday.
The governor testified in favor of a bill that would permanently require private health insurance coverage of certain mental illnesses. She called upon her past, growing up with a mother diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Once known as manic depression, bipolar disorder is characterized by extreme changes in mood, energy and behavior.
"This bill reaffirms Hawaii's commitment to equal treatment for all of our citizens. It eliminates distinctions that set the seriously mentally ill apart and places them on an equal footing with persons who suffer from physical illnesses," Lingle said.
The bill passed out of committee and is headed to the Senate Consumer Protection and Housing Committee. A similar bill heard last month by a House panel was held in committee.
The measure received overwhelming support from mental health advocates. Those opposed to the measure included the Hawaii Medical Service Association and Kaiser Permanente, which cited increased costs to consumers and employers.
"As a policy, HMSA has always opposed legislative, unfunded health-care mandates," said Jennifer Diesman, a lobbyist for the preferred-provider organization. "We believe an employer should have the ability to determine what to put in their benefit packages, and not the Legislature."
The bill would do two things. It prevents the current law, which covers schizophrenia and schizo-affective disorder, from expiring in June. It also adds additional illnesses such as major depression, bipolar types I and II, obsessive-compulsive disorder and dissociative disorder.
Her voice cracking with emotion at times, Lingle told lawmakers why the bill should pass.
"It just doesn't make any sense why we would have to come and even testify on something like this. It's a sickness. It's an illness. You don't come and testify for diabetes or for high blood pressure, and yet you'll prescribe medicine for those," Lingle said.
Lingle said she understands why insurance might not have covered some of these illnesses back when her mother, who is now 75 and living in a nursing home in California, was first diagnosed more than 40 years ago.
"They didn't really know much about it. People didn't talk about it. Families certainly didn't talk about it. We didn't talk about it with anybody. We'd just work within ourselves and did our best," she said.
Like thousands of others at the time, her mother underwent treatment that included electric shock therapy, she said.
"There was a theory that there was something bothering you that was making you act like this, so we'll just zap your memory to forget those bad things, I guess without wondering what would happen to the good things that they zap out when they do that," she said.
Lingle said her father turned to his children for help.
"I'm not looking for sympathy from you or from anybody else, but what my family did was use our education accounts to care for my mom," she said. "My dad had to come to us as his children and tell us we just had to take care of my mom.
"My mom is a terrific person. She just has a chemical imbalance in her brain, and as I told the committee, it's like any other illness that should be covered by health insurance," Lingle said after the hearing.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.