State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Assemblywoman Wendy Carillo (D-Los Angeles), the authors of Assembly Bill 665, claim the criticisms of the bill are misinformation.
Nicole Pearson, an Orange County attorney and founder of Facts, Law, Truth, and Justice—an organization that strives to protect civil liberties and basic human rights—accused Carillo and Wiener of “low-balling” the full impact of the bill and using minorities and the LGBT communities “to hide the actual intent.”
“It’s about taking children from parents without a claim of abuse,” she said at the hearing.
Pearson claimed AB 665 is a “badly written dangerous bill” that’s too broad and unclear.
“AB 665 is not about obtaining medical coverage or aligning to codes. It’s about taking children from parents without a claim of abuse,” Pearson said. “The authors want to change the law to let a 12-year-old to opt out of their home on a whim, invoking parental separation and emancipation of minors without any claim of danger or parental consent. This is child emancipation.”
If the bill aims to expand access to mental health care, she said the bill’s authors could have simply proposed striking the word “not” from Section 124260 of the Health & Safety Code which states that such mental health services “shall not apply to the receipt of benefits under the Medi-Cal program,” Pearson argued.
“But they didn’t,” she said. “Instead, they want to amend the Family Code and strike 44 years of guardrails that ensure that mental health providers only place a child into a residential shelter if that child is in danger of abuse, incest, or harm to themselves or others.”
Wendy Minas, a Los Angeles mother of five children, said people in her community are not happy with the proposed legislation.
“They are shocked and angry that you would consider passing an extreme bill that would break apart families during a child’s most difficult and challenging years,” she told the committee. “Kids can be impulsive, influenced and rebellious. Instead of emancipating them, we should be creating programs that support human communication and keeping families together.”
If AB 665 becomes law, Minas said a child could go to school one day and not come home, as they enter themselves into the child welfare system as wards of the state, while parents will be left trying to find them and fighting to get them back.
“What about when your daughter starts talking to a much older boy or your son is accessing unhealthy media sites? Or, what if they are just hanging out with kids that are getting in trouble, and you try and guide them through that with boundaries, and they rebel?” she asked.
The bill, Minas said, would emancipate children to leave home and enable such dangerous behavior to continue at a group home.
Taylor Chambers, an attorney for the National Center for Youth Law, and a co-sponsor of the bill, told the committee that AB 665 would address “deeply inequitable” policies that create barriers for youth on Medi-Cal who seek mental health counseling.
“Youth who rely on Medi-Cal must meet significantly higher levels of acuity before insurance will pay for their care, which means that youth on private insurance can access needed care at an earlier stage, while youth on Medi-Cal must effectively be in crisis before the insurance will pay for their care,” she said.
Chambers said youth on Medi-Cal are “predominantly youth of color and youth experiencing poverty.”
U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) studies showing an increases in feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness and a rise in attempted suicide rates among youth make it “even more important to open every possible door to care,” Chambers said.
Esther Lau, a student advocate from the San Francisco Bay Area said she supports the bill because she believes it would hold MediCal to the same standards as private insurance companies.
“In my sophomore year of high school during the height of the pandemic, I was struggling with mental health, like many others were at the time,” Lau said. “My parents were incredibly understanding and supportive, encouraging me to seek medical support but as first-generation immigrants they were quite unfamiliar with the healthcare system so I ... navigated the medical system myself.”
Lau claims she was initially denied mental health care due to long waiting lists and “administrative complications” involved in the bureaucracy of the health care system, but eventually found a clinic that provided free short-term therapy to youth.
“As a low-income student who certainly has heavily benefited from public assistance programs, including Medi-Cal, CalFresh and Section 8 housing, I’ve experienced what it’s like to seek mental health support throughout the medical system,” Lau said. “AB 665 affirms that access to mental health services is essential health care and a human right.”
“All we had to do was strike ‘not’ and then all those groups of children would be able to access, so I’m just curious why we took this other approach when that was very simple and eloquent,” Wilk said.
“This bill does not take away parental rights. This bill does not allow an opportunity for a parent or guardian to be involved. It does, however, align itself with existing policy. ... Unfortunately, the conversation has far exceeded what the intent of this bill is,” she told the committee. “It’s now a national conversation related to mental health and young people that also brings into the national conversation about LGBTQ plus rights. The two issues are separate.”
Wiener accused critics such as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) of creating “extreme misinformation.”
“It generates just an avalanche of vile, toxic, horrible stuff,” he said.
Wiener said AB 665 is a “common sense” bill intended to expand access to counseling for young people who need it, including a growing number of homeless youth.
“They are on their own on the streets, and to put them through hoops to try to access residential shelter is incredibly inhumane. They should simply be able to obtain it,” he said.
He accused opponents of trying to “stoke outrage” on social media and creating “absolutely false moral panic that people are running around trying to steal people’s children.”
“The outrage machine completely undermines our efforts to address actual children at risk by making pretend that all children are somehow being targeted, and that the mental health profession is targeting them, and their teachers are targeting them, and LGBTQ people are targeting them. It is outrageous.”
Erin Friday, a Democrat, an attorney and the western U.S. regional co-leader of Our Duty, a parental rights group that opposes transgender ideology, told the Assembly judiciary committee on March 28 that AB 665 would violate parental rights under federal and state constitutional law. She called AB 665 “state-sanctioned kidnapping.”
