It’s Tuesday…
President Biden’s public schedule for 07/25/2023:
| 10:00 AM Presidential Daily Briefing | The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing Closed Press |
| 12:00 PM Sings a Proclamation | The President signs a proclamation to establish the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Illinois and Mississippi; The Vice President participates Pre-Credentialed Media & Pooled for TV |
| 3:00 PM Remarks | The President delivers remarks on expanding access to mental health care East RoomPre-Credentialed Media & Pooled for TV |
| 3:30 PM Press Briefing | Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre James S. Brady Press Briefing Room |
Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Tweet
From Tuesday…
From the White House…
FACT SHEET: President Biden Designates Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument (07/25/2023):
Today, on what would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday, President Biden will sign a proclamation establishing the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi and Illinois. The new national monument will tell the story of the events surrounding Emmett Till’s murder, their significance in the civil rights movement and American history, and the broader story of Black oppression, survival, and bravery in America.
The new national monument will be anchored at three historic sites in Chicago, Illinois; Sumner, Mississippi; and just outside of Glendora, Mississippi. These sites are central to Emmett Till’s racially motivated murder in 1955 and the defining events that followed – including the courageous activism and leadership of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. The new national monument will also encourage and enable partnerships between the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and local communities and organizations to help conserve and interpret a broader network of historic sites that help tell the story of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley.
The nationwide coverage of the horrific lynching of Emmett Till, as well as Mamie Till-Mobley’s courageous efforts to honor her son’s story through education and activism, elevated the broader reality of the injustices and inequality that Black people experienced during the Jim Crow era and helped catalyze the civil rights movement. Mere months following Emmett Till’s murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus. She later cited Emmett Till as the reason she would not acquiesce.
White House.gov. 07/25/2023.
Today’s designation builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s work to advance civil rights and racial justice, including through the President’s signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act that codified lynching as a federal hate crime. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument is President Biden’s fourth new national monument, and reflects the Administration’s commitment to protecting places that help tell a more complete story of our nation’s history.
Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument
The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will be managed by the National Park Service, and comprises 5.70 acres across three separate historic sites in Illinois and Mississippi. Through the historical objects protected at these sites, the monument tells the story of Emmett Till’s too-short life and murder, the unjust acquittal of his murderers, and the activism of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who courageously brought the world’s attention to the brutal injustices and racism of the time.
While on a trip from his home in Chicago to visit family in the Mississippi Delta in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was accused of making inappropriate advances toward a white female grocery clerk. Emmett Till’s cousins and friends, who were present at the scene, disputed the claim. Four days after the alleged incident, he was pulled from his bed, kidnapped, and brutally murdered by at least two white men. Three days following this abduction, on August 31, 1955, Emmett Till’s mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River.
Graball Landing, located just outside of Glendora, Mississippi, is one of the three sites preserved by the new national monument. Graball Landing is believed to be the site where Emmett Till’s body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River. In 2008, the community installed a memorial sign that has been removed or vandalized multiple times since it was first erected. The most recent version of the sign – dedicated in October 2019 – is over an inch thick and bulletproof.Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, is the second monument site. The church is where on September 3, 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley held an open-casket funeral service for her son in defiance of directives from Mississippi authorities that Emmett Till be buried quickly in Mississippi. Over the course of several days, as many as 125,000 people attended the visitation and funeral services to mourn Emmett Till and bear witness.
White House.gov. 07/25/2023.
The third monument site is the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi where the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers began on September 19, 1955 in a segregated courtroom. An all-white jury wrongfully acquitted Emmett Till’s two killers after just over an hour of deliberation. Both killers later admitted their crimes to a leading magazine in an interview for which they were paid. No one was ever held legally accountable for Emmett Till’s death.
In addition to designating the three sites as a new national monument, today’s proclamation directs the National Park Service to develop a plan in consultation with local communities, organizations, and the public to support the interpretation and preservation of other key sites in Mississippi and Illinois that help tell the story of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley. This may include the Glendora Cotton Gin (currently known as the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center), Mound Bayou, the Tutwiler Funeral Home, and the Emmett Till Boyhood Home.
Today’s designation honors the tireless efforts of Emmett Till’s family, community and civil rights leaders, and local, state, and federal elected officials to ensure that these sites are protected and that Emmett Till’s story continues to be told. In the lead up to the designation, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory visited the sites and met with community members to learn about their vision on how to best educate the public about not only the brutal lynching of Emmett Till, but how the events surrounding his death helped to dismantle Jim Crow and served as a turning point in the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
Background on Antiquities Act Designations
President Theodore Roosevelt first used the Antiquities Act in 1906 to designate Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. Since then, 18 presidents of both parties have used this authority to protect unique natural and historic features in America, including the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty, the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, Stonewall National Monument, and the César E. Chávez National Monument.
The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument is President Biden’s fourth new monument designation, following the creation of the Castner Range National Monument in Texas and Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada this spring, and Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado last fall.
White House.gov. 07/25/2023.
President Biden signs the Proclamation @ Noon D.C., time.
Economy/Bidenomics Tweets
From Monday…
The video clip is 1 minute long.
Steinar: Hello, my name is Steinar, welcome to my shipyard. I love to build ships and I have 1,500 smiling workers here thanks to the government and you.
President Biden: What I saw today was overwhelming–the continued belief that maybe we can do all of this. Maybe we can be the leading manufacture in the world. Maybe we can be the leading power in moving clean energy in the world, not just the United States. Maybe we can generate jobs for hard working people. And what we’re about to do is we’re about to get to the point by 2035, where all electricity is generated in America is done by clean energy. You saw these workers here. These are skilled workers to be a union electrician, to be a union mechanic. It takes 4 to 5 years, an apprenticeship to do it. They work like hell–they’re the best in the world. Wall street didn’t build the middle class, unions built the middle class. Middle class built America. That’s what this is all about.
American Rescue Plan.
Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
Inflation Reduction Act.
CHIPS and Science Act.
Mental Health Tweets
From Monday…
From the White House…
FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Takes Action to Make it Easier to Access In-Network Mental Health Care (07/25/2023):
President Biden announces new landmark rule to strengthen mental and physical health parity requirements and improve mental health care access for more than 150 million Americans
Ensuring robust access to mental health care has been a bipartisan priority for almost 15 years, since the 2008 enactment of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA), a landmark law that called for mental health care benefits covered by health plans to be provided at the same level as physical health care benefits, and which was strengthened on a bipartisan basis in 2020. Yet today, too many Americans still struggle to find and afford the care they need. Of the 21% of adults who had any mental illness in 2020, less than half received mental health care; fewer than one in ten with a substance use disorder received treatment. Research shows that people with private health coverage have a hard time finding a mental health provider in their health plan’s network, like these two mothers in California. They struggled to find a therapist to help their children, calling multiple therapists in their plans’ networks, only to find that these providers weren’t accepting new patients or had months long waiting lists.
White House.gov. 07/25/2023.
Despite the repeated bipartisan efforts aimed at mental health parity, insurers too often make it difficult to access mental health treatment, causing millions of consumers to seek care out-of-network at significantly higher costs and pay out of pocket, or defer care altogether. One study shows that insured people are well more than twice as likely to be forced to go out-of-network and pay higher fees for mental health care than for physical health care. And the problem is getting worse: in recent years, the gap between usage of out-of-network care for mental health and substance use disorder benefits versus physical health benefits increased 85 percent. As a result, millions of people are paying for out of network care for mental health services they need, like this family in Michigan who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat their son’s depression and anxiety because the specialized care he needed wasn’t close to home and this mother in Rhode Island who had to submit additional paperwork to get care for her daughter when her private insurance company initially denied her treatment.
President Biden believes mental health is health. As part of his Unity Agenda, he released a comprehensive national strategy to transform how mental health is understood, accessed, treated, and integrated in and out of health care settings. That’s why, today, the President is announcing new actions that would improve and strengthen mental health parity requirements and ensure that more than 150 million Americans with private health insurance can better access mental health benefits under their insurance plan. Today’s proposed rule reinforces MHPAEA’s fundamental goal of ensuring that families have the same access to mental health and substance use benefits as they do physical health benefits. And it would make it easier to get in-network mental health care and eliminate barriers to access that keep people from getting the care they need, when they need it. Specifically, the proposed rule would:
- Require health plans to make changes when they are providing inadequate access to mental health care. In 2020, Congress made changes to MHPAEA that require health plans to conduct meaningful comparative analyses that will help ensure that access to mental health and substance use benefits is no more restrictive than to medical benefits. Today’s proposed rule would make clear that health plans need to evaluate the outcomes of their coverage rules to make sure people have equivalent access between their mental health and medical benefits. This includes evaluating the health plan’s actual provider network, how much it pays out-of-network providers, and how often prior authorization is required and the rate at which prior authorization requests are denied. These analyses will show plans where they are failing to meet their requirements under the law, and will require plans to improve access to mental health care – by including more mental health professionals in their networks or reducing red tape to get care – to be in compliance with the law.
- Make it clear what health plans can and cannot do. The proposed rule will provide specific examples that make clear that health plans cannot use more restrictive prior authorization, other medical management techniques, or narrower networks that make it harder for people to access mental health and substance use disorder benefits than their medical benefits. Under the proposed rule, health plans must use similar factors in setting out-of-network payment rates for mental health and substance use disorder providers as they do for medical providers.
- Close existing loopholes. When MHPAEA was first enacted, it did not require non-federal governmental health plans, like those offered to state and local government employees, to comply with its requirements. Today’s proposed rule would close that loophole and codify Congressional changes made to MHPAEA by requiring more than 200 additional health plans to comply with MHPAEA, providing critical protections to 90,000 consumers.
With today’s changes, this rule would help increase utilization of mental health and substance use care, ensure comparable payment for mental health care professionals, likely incentivizing more people to join the mental health workforce. In addition to announcing the proposed rule, the President also announced the Administration’s intention to issue a request for information on how it can best work with states to ensure compliance with MHPAEA’s critical protections for the millions of Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled in private Medicaid health plans.
White House.gov. 07/25/2023.
These actions are the latest in a series of steps the Administration has taken to tackle the mental health care crisis, including:
- Advancing access to services in Medicare. The Administration recently issued proposed rules that, if finalized, would expand access to mental health and substance use care by covering intensive outpatient services; increasing Medicare rates for crisis care, substance use disorder treatment, and psychotherapy; and allowing more mental health and substance use providers to get paid by Medicare.
- Enhancing crisis response. The Administration has invested nearly $1 billion into strengthening and expanding the 9-8-8 suicide and crisis lifeline. Earlier this month, the Administration added Spanish text and chat services to the existing LGBTQI+ and veteran specific specialized services 9-8-8 offers, and is also developing video phone services to better serve deaf and hard of hearing individuals in the coming months.
- Providing mental health services in schools. The Administration recently updated Medicaid School Claiming and Administrative Guide and proposed a rule that would make it easier for schools to bill Medicaid by streamlining billing processes and permissions.
President Biden remarks on expanding access to mental health @ 3:00 p.m. D.C., time.
The White House press briefing is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. D.C., time.
This is an Open Thread.
