In case you missed it, political outsider, successful business leader, and Republican nominee for U.S. Senate Joe O'Dea participated in Colorado's first ever forum focused on mental health. Watch the full forum here.See the highlights below:
On Access to Care
"I think there's a lot of issues with that bill [The American Rescue Plan]...""We need to look at training. And when we talk about training, it needs to be a partnership with business. It needs to be a partnership with colleges. It needs to be a partnership with four-year schools. We need to treat it as an intern program so that we can have businesses help us get more people into this industry. There's a shortage across the nation in every industry. This is no different. But we need to take a business-type of approach, we don't need government in the way. What we need is resources and make sure that we get across the finish line.""People with money, they can go in and they can afford to buy whatever services they need. When you start looking at the middle class, working Americans, we get left behind."
On Substance Abuse
"Well, the first thing we need to do is address the supply side. Right now we have a border that is leaking fentanyl at record levels."
"This situation is being caused by a border that hasn't been secured. We got to start there."
"We got lots of laws on the books and we're not enforcing them. I mean, that's part of the problem. We need to put drug dealers away."
"It's a deeply personal issue for me, my wife and I lost a very dear friend, [the friend's] 25-year old daughter overdosed a year and a half ago. It's killing our kids. We need to put these people away. We need stiffer penalties for drug dealers."
On Mental Health Services for Youth
"I think we've got to start with our school systems. Right now, we don't have choice for all school systems. You basically, if you're in an underperforming area, your kids end up in that school system. If you look at the scores, the test scores, they're down, especially in communities of color they're down 24-27% that are reading at that age. We need to change that. We need to make sure that every parent can do what my parents did, which was put me in a school system where I could succeed. They made a choice. It monumentally changed my life. We need to start there. Kids have to have a future. And that future starts with an education. The closest thing to magic in the United States is school choice, put them somewhere where they can succeed. We can get them mental health at those institutions, we need to be preventative and not reactive. $5 trillion and we haven't addressed this? $5 trillion in the last two years, and we haven't addressed this. It's got to change."
"Why aren't they on focused on education for our kids? Why aren't they focused on those things that are important to working Americans, instead of paying criminals unemployment to be in jail? The priorities have got to change and that's the reason I'm running."
On Equity in Mental Health Access
"The STAR program is an excellent start."
"We need to make sure we we understand that that doesn't replace crime prevention. That's, that's a tool. It's not a replacement. We've got major problems here in Colorado and across the United States. And they're all related. It's homelessness. It's drug addiction. It's suicide, all of those things go hand in hand."
"But we need to refocus some of the allocations that we've made over the past two years. To me, we've got money that hasn't been spent within some of the school systems. Now, that was COVID money. We haven't used it, we should be using that to help our kids, help them mentally. Those are the type of items that I'd like to see us get done."
On Expanding a Mental Health Workforce
"I think we do have a problem. It's nationwide. It's in almost every industry. And I think it starts with a junior high, high school education. We continue to tell kids that they need to go through a four-year program. And that's important. It is important for some kids. Some kids are like me, though, they didn't do so well in college. What I did is, I went through an apprenticeship program, and it helped me find my way. We need to have that same type of apprenticeship program available to healthcare workers, available to counselors, to therapists, put them in a situation where businesses can sponsor them so they're getting paid while they're learning. Make sure that the four-year and the two-year colleges, that those two curriculums line up, so that when they transfer from one school to the next they're not losing credits. We start at that level, and we begin to grow a workforce. And that's how it starts. And that's how we get them into our industry."
On Building Community Based Supports
"We're throwing $500 million a year in the City and County of Denver, that homelessness, drug addiction, and trying to get people into programs. We've thrown that in for every year, it's nowhere near enough. We've got to start from scratch. We need new programs that basically address this before it's a crisis. We've got to get to our kids..."
"I would like to see school choice for every kid in the United States. Imagine that, imagine you can take and put your kid somewhere where they can be successful. That's the key. We've got to start at that level and reinvent our system. We can't continue to throw money at things that aren't working. It's not working."
Learn more about Joe O’Dea’s campaign here.
Original source can be found here.
