Long before COVID-19 reached our shores, our nation was confronting a massive public health emergency. Even as the coronavirus pandemic has taken center stage, a mental health crisis that has long persisted is worsening. This problem may be quieter, but its toll is just as devastating.

The COVID-19 pandemic has only made things worse, isolating individuals in their homes, interrupting services like school counseling and traumatizing frontline health care providers. People’s well-being is suffering because of the massive economic impacts of COVID-19: job loss, looming eviction and unpaid bills.

And so a second pandemic—a mental health pandemic—looms on the horizon. Rates of mental health conditions such as depression, substance use and anxiety are skyrocketing. “Deaths of despair” — overdoses and suicides — are rising, too. No one in our communities is left untouched by this crisis: young and old, rural and urban. It strikes regardless of gender, race, ethnicity or religion.

Even though more and more Americans are suffering, getting mental health care remains difficult. At the heart of this problem is insurance companies’ refusal to pay for care.

In 2008, Congress tried to address this by passing the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which required that insurance companies cover mental health and substance use disorder care the same way they cover physical health care. Yet, to this day, insurance companies violate federal law and discriminate against mental health and substance use disorder services, putting patients, families and our loved ones at risk. Health insurers’ decisions to flout the law and ignore the human costs of untreated mental illness are unconscionable.

Insurance companies continue to pay providers differently, cover fewer services and move behavioral health providers out of reach. They skirt the law because they can get away with it. We cannot continue to allow insurance companies to pander to shareholders instead of helping patients.

Now, more than ever, mental health and substance use disorder care must be available and affordable. We must prioritize and fully integrate mental health into our health care system, fulfilling the promise that the U.S. Congress made 12 years ago. Mental health care needs should be treated equally to physical health care needs. Enforcing this parity requires both federal and state action.

That is why we both introduced legislation — Senate Bill 855 in California and the Strengthening Behavioral Health Parity Act in the House of Representatives — to finally enforce the 2008 law and hold insurance companies accountable. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB855 into law in September, and we’re eager for the Strengthening Behavioral Health Parity Act to become federal law.

The failure to bring mental health equity to this system has had devastating, even deadly, consequences in our communities. The coronavirus pandemic, and the opioid epidemic before it, have laid bare the severe shortcomings in our mental health care system.

We’ve seen insurance networks shrink and provider shortages grow because insurance companies have chosen profits over patients. The onerous requirements that they put on providers prevent them from treating patients—and sometimes force them to deny care entirely.

Shuttered behavioral health providers battled insurance companies only to be reimbursed at rates so low, they couldn’t survive. An aging workforce cannot recruit new psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers because salaries are capped by those same miniscule reimbursements. And this burden falls quickly from the providers to the patients. Even when patients do find a behavioral health provider that is covered by their insurance company, they face similar administrative barriers to treatment they would never encounter when seeking other medical care.

The result is that people go without mental health care or bankrupt themselves or their families to pay for it. Trying to find a behavioral health provider who is accepting new patients and accepts your insurance is nearly impossible. And if patients choose to go out of network and bear the staggering out-of-pocket costs, they’ll be confronted with an intentionally complex, complicated process of filing monthly claims that may be denied anyway. This is not sustainable.

Our bills will make sure that nobody with private insurance is left dealing with an insurer who ignores their mental health needs. The coronavirus has challenged our communities, our economy and our government. As its effects continue, increasing demand for mental health treatment, the status quo is not good enough.

We need to uphold the promise Congress made 12 years ago — that mental health and substance use disorder care is health care and that patients can count on insurance to provide real coverage for treatment. We need to achieve for all Americans what SB 855 has accomplished for Californians. The Strengthening Behavioral Health Parity Act will finally force insurers to comply with this law at the federal level, ensuring that our health plans finally have parity.

Katie Porter represents California’s 45th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Senator Scott Wiener represents San Francisco and parts of San Mateo County in the California State Senate.