Jim Hackett gets personal.
Question: Why is mental health parity so important to you?
Jim Hackett: Yeah, we got involved through an instant that happened with one of my daughter. She was a 16 years old and sexually assaulted at a prep school in the Northeast, for no reason, I mean other than she was around a bad guy at the wrong time and it was part of a kitchen during that she was doing that was record of all the students and this man took her downstairs did some unspeakable things and fortunately the justice system put him away for 25 years.
But I lost my daughter for a year, literally couldn't speak to her, if she was going to these kind of balls of, where she ball up or rise and go back ahead and she couldn't speak literally for days at a time and we went in thought that the best possible is we brought her to the best psychiatrist and only a year and half in to this whole thing, after missing a year school and going back had a miss for another half year. She had a female psychiatrist help her out of the abbes and she went back and testifying as this guy and put him in prison and it was remarkable and she is completely different lady because of that, but she is still wounded. What daunted my wife and I is that for the first time in our lives we understood that manual health was real, because this is a girl who is in everyway healthy before and there was a traumatic event in her life that changed her chemistry literally, her physiology changed, I know what I saw, because her mind was had a shock and we thought "God this poor young ladies," particularly, but also extends to the young man who may be in inner cites who do not have the resources or family unit like we did who would ever couple of this married that is totally supported totally in love with the child and some what close to unlimited resources try to help her with, they would never got out of their home, ever. Then we started examining what and we saw, because of what our polices covered and we of course could do without it, but we saw how inferior it was that you had more limited treatments for mental wellness than you got for physical wellness and different cabs and our only point was that we think that federal government, where there is healthcare provided for physical reasons are also included mental healthcare as part of the physical reasons, because we have seen the physical manifestation of it. We have absolutely no doubt that the mind is part of what causes physical illness or physical health and so we implemented voluntarily in a number of companies in Houston, including all the ones I have been associate with. And we continued argue forwarding congress, there has been a bill past in the house, and there has been bill past in senate. It to me it is a bit where I just got done telling you how little government intervention that I had, this is not government intervention in terms of saying "hey provide medical care like this terror, just where is healthcare already provided, I am convinced, because I run a companies, I have went through three companies where we had this happen and increases your medical bills by one and half percent or less. And in return for that you get huge amounts of productivity, not just from the employee who may have that happened, but from every family member who is affected by so body who may have that happen. The amount of times that I went emergency rooms and left my job to go take my daughter isn't absolute proof of productivity lost. It wasn't me that has the issue. It was the family member who had it. And same as true through out the country, so there is actually no doubt that all in my mind that the federal government will say, if you provide healthcare, don't treat it in a discriminatory fashion and that what we are arguing for. And interestingly I am argueing I guess the business lot, because they don't want pass go up, but there are number of businesses that I considered enlighten in Huston who have adopted this voluntarily and we believe whole heartily in it, because we have seen it work.
Recorded on: March 24, 2008.
