Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg on Friday laid out a proposal designed to combat America’s opioid epidemic while making some of the most sweeping changes in mental health care since the shift from institutional to community-based care half a century ago.

The plan by Buttigieg, who is mayor of South Bend, Indiana, represents an effort to fight an addiction crisis that has already taken nearly halfa million lives and has, somewhat belatedly, become a major topic of discussion in American politics.

But Buttigieg wants to do a lot more than simply reduce addiction and the suffering it has brought to wide swaths of America. He also wants to transform mental health care by increasing the number of front-line mental health workers, making sure insurance pays fully for psychiatric treatments and integrating mental health care into physical health care more generally.

Buttigieg’s overall goal, advisers told HuffPost, is to attack mental health as a public health crisis, with the federal government financing local efforts that focus on prevention and detection as much as treatment.

The total cost would be $300 billion over 10 years, advisers said.

“Our plan breaks down the barriers around mental health and builds up a sense of belonging that will help millions of suffering Americans heal,” Buttigieg said in a prepared statement.

Parts of Buttigieg’s policy vision overlap heavily with what some of his 2020 Democratic rivals are proposing. Earlier this week, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) unveiled a proposal that calls for some of the same steps that Buttigieg’s plan does.

“It’s time for mental health to be taken as seriously as physical health,” Gillibrand wrote in a Medium post introducing her plan.

And although there are some big differences of scale and substance among the candidate plans, all would represent a sharp departure from the policies of President Donald Trump, who has spent much of his first term undermining public programs that pay for mental health treatment and reinforcing stigmas around psychiatric illness.

An Agenda That Experts Endorse

If successful, Buttigieg vows, his plan will make sure that 75% of people who need treatment for mental health problems or addiction get that care ― a dramatic increase from today, when only a small fractiondo. In the process, Buttigieg says, his plan could save a million lives within a decade.

Those are lofty goals, obviously, requiring not just enactment of Buttigieg’s entire agenda but also near-flawless implementation ― not to mention a fairly heroic assumption that the multitude of programs Buttigieg wants to fund would prove as effective as their advocates promise.

Still, his general approach is consistent with what experts have recommended for some time.

Today, for example, the gold standard for addressing opioid addiction is “medication-assisted treatment,” or MAT, in which addiction patients take alternatives that satisfy their cravings without producing a high.

MAT used to be a lot more controversial because critics said it didn’t fully “cure” people of their addictions. But there’s now overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness. To increase its use, Buttigieg would take a variety of steps, like requiring that insurance plans cover it fully and enabling more front-line health care workers to prescribe it.