The State Capitol’s Legislative Office Building was a sea of red on May 13 as NUHW members wearing their union shirts and allies walked from office to office lobbying for two key bills to improve and protect access to human-centered mental health care.
Overall, NUHW members met with more than 60 legislators and their top staffers on behalf of AB 2511, a bill to start to address the pay disparity between mental health providers and similar medical providers, and SB 903, a bill that would regulate the use of artificial intelligence in mental health settings.
While AB 2511 failed to make it out of the Assembly’s Appropriation Committee, SB 903 was without any opposition votes in the State Senate and now heads to the Assembly.
“I feel empowered,” Monique Dixon, a psychiatric social worker for Kaiser in Fontana, said after stepping out of a meeting with several fellow Kaiser clinicians and Assemblymember Ash Kalra, a Democrat from San Jose.
“It’s nice to hear that there are people in positions of power that are… supporting the work we do, and supporting the working class.”
SB 903, a bill authored by State Senator Steve Padilla, D-San Diego, would regulate how artificial intelligence can be used for behavioral health services.
NUHW is part of a broad coalition working to advance the bill, including the California Psychological Association, the California Behavioral Health Association, the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and the Alliance for Children’s Rights.
The bill would require healthcare providers, including Kaiser, to request a patient’s consent before using AI to record sessions or screen a person for mental health services. It would also prohibit the use of artificial intelligence tools to make independent therapeutic decisions or to detect emotions or mental states.
NUHW members shared their own experiences to advocate for the bill. Citlalli Vazquez Reyes told a staffer for State Senator Sasha Renee Perez that using artificial intelligence to triage people reaching out for mental health care is dangerous because what they answer on an online questionnaire might not reflect the depth of what they’re experiencing.
“Patients will underreport,” she said. “They don’t always feel comfortable saying the whole truth. So if we only rely on that, we’ll send them down one path thinking they’re fine, no risk, when in reality I often have to find myself doing crisis emergency stuff because I’m actually assessing visually what I’m seeing.”
Legislators responded positively to NUHW members and our priority bills.
“You want human beings making the decision,” Assemblymember Kalra told clinicians talking about the artificial intelligence bill. “The bottom line is that actually interacting with patients, you can’t replicate that with technology. Technology can help … but ultimately human beings should make the decisions.”
Lobby Day has become an annual tradition as NUHW has gotten increasingly more active in state politics. The annual event, which coincides with Mental Health Awareness Day in Sacramento, has helped NUHW pass several bills into law, most recently AB 3221, a bill authored by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin that enhanced the Department of Managed Health Care’s ability to enforce state laws by requiring health plans to provide digitally searchable data, thereby streamlining investigations.
Andrea Hatfield, a therapist with Kaiser in Southern California, came up to Sacramento for the first time, and is ready to do more.
“These current times call for increased political action,” she said. “It was important for me to know what’s happening (with NUHW) on a larger scale and to help support it.”
Save the Date: Join us on May 12, 2027, for NUHW Lobby Day, which will once again coincide with Mental Health Matters Day, in Sacramento.
