At the California Capitol, several Republican lawmakers voted against the bill, AB 665. One of them was Assembly member James Gallagher of Sutter County.

“If my child is dealing with a mental health crisis, I want to know about it,” Gallagher said while discussing the bill on the Assembly floor last spring. “This misguided, and I think wrongful, trend in our policy now that is continuing to exclude parents from that equation and say they don’t need to be informed is wrong.”

State lawmaker salaries are too high for them or their families to qualify for Medi-Cal. Instead, they are offered a choice of 15 commercial health insurance plans, meaning children like Gallagher’s already have the privileges that he objected to in his speech.

To Lu, this was frustrating and hypocritical. She said she felt that the opponents lining up against AB 665 at legislative hearings were mostly middle-class parents trying to hijack the narrative.

“It’s inauthentic that they were advocating against a policy that won’t directly affect them,” Lu said. “They don’t realize that this is a policy that will affect hundreds of thousands of other families.”

Sponsors of AB 665 presented the bill as a commonsense update to an existing law. In 2010, California lawmakers had made it easier for young people to access outpatient mental health treatment and emergency shelters without their parents’ consent by removing a requirement that they be in immediate crisis.

But at the last minute, lawmakers in 2010 removed the expansion of coverage for teenagers by Medi-Cal for cost reasons. More than a decade later, AB 665 is meant to close the disparity between public and private insurance and level the playing field.

“This is about equity,” said Assembly member Wendy Carrillo, a Los Angeles Democrat and the bill’s author.

The original law, which regulated private insurance plans, passed with bipartisan support and had little meaningful opposition in the legislature, she said. The law was signed by a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“Since then, the extremes on both sides have gotten so extreme that we have a hard time actually talking about the need for mental health,” she said.

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