HARTFORD — Mark Barden sometimes lies in bed at night thinking of all the ways the gunman who killed 26 people, including his 7-year-old son Daniel, at Sandy Hook Elementary School could have been stopped.

Perhaps a police officer could have pulled over Adam Lanza before he entered the school on that December day in 2012, Barden said. Or Barden himself might have run into Lanza and tackled him to the ground.

"These are the things that go through your head,'' Barden said. "Over the last three years, there's been a lot of talk about what could have been done differently, what policies or protocols or legislation should have been in place. One thing is clear: ... As a nation, we have to fix our mental health care system, because it is broken and we need to do better."

Barden came to the Legislative Office Building Friday to highlight comprehensive mental health legislation that cleared a key congressional committee this week. He was joined by U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., one of the bill's chief sponsors, and Bill Sherlach, who's wife, Mary Sherlach, was also killed in the Sandy Hook shootings.

The bipartisan Mental Health Reform Act, which passed the health, education, labor and pensions committee on Wednesday, marked a rare moment of cooperation in a Congress riven by bickering and dragged down by gridlock, said Murphy, who co-sponsored the measure with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.

The far-reaching bill proposes sweeping changes to the way behavioral health care is delivered in the U.S. It would provide grants to encourage the development of programs that focus on early intervention for children, and would ease some privacy restrictions to help parents of adult children obtain more information about their loved one's treatment. And it would place a new emphasis on using telecommunications to provide health services.

The legislation also seeks to strengthen current law requiring insurers to treat mental health care the same way they treat physical health care. "We passed a law years ago that says if you're an insurance company, you'll cover mental illness in the same way you cover physical illness, but the fact is, though your benefit plan may tell you you have the ability to get coverage for mental illness, that's not how it plays out in real life,'' Murphy said.

Murphy said the bill would close some bureaucratic loopholes by providing guidance to insurers about what they must cover, and would give federal regulators the power to audit companies that have a pattern of denying behavioral health services.

Murphy has been pressing for reform of the mental health system since the Sandy Hook shootings in December 2012. This bill marks the most significant changes to the federal mental health policies since the 1960s.

The legislation is the product of lengthy hearings, including several in Connecticut. In fact, Murphy said, "this bill was built here in Connecticut."

Notably, the bill does not contain a significant expansion of funding for in-patient and outpatient treatment. Murphy said that will likely come later, during the appropriations process.

"This bill still has a ways to go and it has to get better,'' he said, "but there's a bipartisan commitment from all people working on this bill to make sure that when it comes to the floor, hopefully after our spring recess, we [will] add to it significant new resources to expand outpatient and in-patient capacity.''

"There's still unfinished business in this bill, I certainly admit that,'' Murphy added. "This is a fantastic foundation from which to start."

Barden, who stood alongside Murphy, agreed. "We know the vast majority of people who are suffering with mental illness will never engage in violent behavior,'' he said. "But I also know if something like the Mental Health Reform Act were in place a few years ago, perhaps I'd be rushing back to Newtown now to meet the school bus and have little Daniel hop off ... and into my arms."