President Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law on June 25—the first major gun reform bill in three decades. Towsley Foundation Policymaker in Residence Abdul El-Sayed explained it's also the biggest expansion of Medicaid since Obamacare.
"The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act has been framed as a gun reform, but perhaps a more fitting frame for the law is as the biggest single expansion of mental health care in American history—and the biggest expansion of Medicaid—with a few gun provisions," El-Sayed wrote in a recent op-ed for The New Republic.
El-Sayed spoke with Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), one of the key architects of the mental health provisions in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, about how it happened and what it can teach us about policy reform.
“It’s interesting looking back on it, for me. It’s really a case study of doing something big but doing it in a step-by-step way where you could actually get it done,” Stabenow said. “Build the support. Build the advocacy.”
Read the full story here in The New Republic.
