By Michael Ollove
Stateline/Kaiser Health News
Originally published on December 2, 2012
Here are some excerpts:
A Law but No Rules
Congress recognized that equivalence in 2008 when it passed the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Act, which requires insurers to cover mental illness and substance abuse treatment on an equal basis with physical ailments. The law, which passed with substantial bipartisan support, was supposed to eliminate two-tiered systems for co-pays, deductibles or treatment limitations.
The Obama administration's Affordable Care Act will vastly extend the reach of the 2008 law. The older law does not require health insurance plans to offer behavioral health coverage, although if they do it must be on par with benefits provided for medical and surgical care. But the ACA does require that all health plans sold on the soon-to-be-created state health insurance exchanges eventually offer mental health coverage. Those plans, then, will all be required to observe the federal parity act.
The problem, behavioral health advocates say, is that more than four years after President George W. Bush signed the parity bill into law, the Obama administration has yet to complete the federal rules that would enable states to enforce it.
As a result, behavioral health may actually have fallen further behind since passage of the law. In May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report showing that health insurance plans have actually increased the number of exclusions for mental health and addiction treatments since the law was enacted. In 2010 and 2011, for example, 15 percent of the plans surveyed by the GAO were excluding residential mental health, a significant increase from 2008.
"Hundreds of thousands of Americans are being denied their rights under the federal parity law," says James Ramstad, a former Republican congressman who originally introduced the House version of the bill in 1996 at the request of his friend and fellow Minnesotan, the late Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, whose name is memorialized on the law. Wellstone was killed in a plane crash in 2002. "It took 12 years to pass that parity act and four years later, we still have no rules and therefore no enforcement," says Ramstad. "It’s unconscionable."
The entire article is here.
