The President Requests the Pleasure of Your Company...

In which I have a banner day.

So…um…I generally always post these essays on Tuesday mornings.

Tuesday mornings at 9:50, to be precise.

But now it is 12 hours later.

“Jane!” I hear you cry. “What is this madness? What is the world coming to, if your irregularly and sporadically published Substack is not published on Tuesday mornings at 9:50?”

To that I say:

That’s right. I did not post this essay at 9:50 a.m. today, because at 3:00 p.m. today I was at the freaking White House.

Holy moly.

The shortish version of a long story is that my friend Sarah read my Slate essay, and she passed it along to her friend who just happens to work on health care at the White House, and then it just so happened that they were having an event to roll out these vital and amazing new rules aimed at forcing insurance companies to achieve parity between coverage for physical health care and coverage for mental health care, and then Sarah’s friend invited me to attend the event, and that is why I am late posting this. Also, here is coverage of the event (you can catch a glimpse of me at minute 1:15 at the far right of the screen).

Here’s something President Biden said that really struck me: “My dad used to have an expression: Everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity. Imagine being a parent looking at your beautiful child you adore needing help and know you can’t do a damn thing about it because you don’t have the wherewithal…talk about stripping a parent of their dignity — their inability to help their child or their husband or their wife or their mother or their father or someone they adore.”

Amen. There were so many times this past year when I felt not just my dignity being stripped away, but my very humanity. And Ash’s too. It was gutting. And I know that so many parents share my pain, and so many children share Ash’s pain. And I was glad to be able to share this day with other moms and dads who have been through hell but keep fighting. Like Laura Mitchell, who is a force to be reckoned with, in the best way possible:

Oh! And there’s more! Afterwards, a small group of us were invited to talk to some administration officials about our experiences, which is how I ended up bawling my eyes out while I read Ash’s poem The Cycle to the Acting Secretary of Labor (who is an absolute rock star).

So that’s my excuse for my tardiness. Pretty good, huh? Also, this issue is SO important. I heard so many absolutely horrific stories today about children and young adults and adults desperately in need of care, and insurance companies denying access to that care. Our story is not the worst, but even we have struggled to find decent in-network care for Ash (or have had to spend money we cannot afford to get care for her). And my extraordinary brother, who runs this extraordinary program in Seattle, could tell stories all day long about how Medicare and other insurers screw the mentally ill. Because despite the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, insurers routinely throw up impossible barriers to mental health care for vulnerable and extremely ill people, and it has to stop. It is unconscionable.

Anyway, after all of that, I was going to still post the essay I had planned to post (an update on Ash), but Substack started warning me that my post was too long (do you even know me, Substack??), so I will save that for another day, and leave you instead with this iffy picture of me on the walkway to the Oval Office.

It has been one hell of a day.