Bloomberg News



Mental Health Coverage Expanded to Most U.S. Insurance Plans

By Alex Wayne November 08, 2013


Insurers will be required to cover mental illness to the same degree as physical ailments as the Obama administration moves forward with the largest U.S. expansion of behavioral health care in a generation.


Five years after the Mental Health Parity act was passed, and almost a year after the Sandy Hook shooting, regulations to fully implement the law were released today. The new rules mean insurers won’t be able to charge higher co-payments or deductibles for mental illness or limit the duration of care.


Failures in treating mental illness have swelled the workload of police and pushed more emotionally disturbed people into emergency rooms, where they are less likely to get proper care. The new rules expand or protect behavioral health benefits for more than 60 million people, Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. health secretary, said at an event today in Atlanta.


VIDEO:
Obama Speaks About Mental Health Issues


“The parity law, which also applies to policies sold through the exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, is a milestone that recognizes how integral mental health is to overall health and ends discrimination,” said David Shern, interim president and chief executive officer of Mental Health America, a lobbying group based in Alexandria, Virginia.


The Obama administration also considers the rules to be a chief component of an effort to reduce gun violence. The White House included improving mental health services as one of 23 executive actions to combat gun violence after 26 children and adults were killed in a December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.


Personal Toll


“The personal toll for families and individuals is beyond their experience,” Sebelius said today. “This is a personal toll that we take on as a country to help people achieve the promise of recovery.”

A common theme in many of the nation’s worst mass shootings is the gunman’s history of mental illness, including in Newtown, as well as massacres at the Washington Navy Yard this year; at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012;and at the Virginia Tech campus in 2007.


“People with mental illness, they’re far more likely to be victims of a crime than they are to be perpetrators, but we believe the incident highlighted how much untreated mental illness there is in this country,” Sarah Bianchi, the director of economic and domestic policy for Vice President Joe Biden, said on a conference call with reporters.


Newtown Promise


Bianchi said the Obama administration has “finished or made significant progress” on all 23 of its post-Newtown promises by issuing the regulation.

The rules issued today will provide the most definitive regulatory standard to date for implementing the Mental Health Parity Act of 2008, which then-President George W. Bush signed into law. Bush left office in 2009 without his administration ever writing rules to implement the core part of that law. President Barack Obama’s administration issued interim rules in 2010 that still left many aspects of the law open to interpretation.


In January, largely in response to the Newtown shooting, Obama said he would issue final rules this year.


The complexity of the issue, coupled with passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010 that included a new set of “essential health benefits” for insurance plans, delayed the final rule on mental illness, one government official said. The person wasn’t authorized to discuss the postponement and asked not to be identified.


Health Law


“Countless Americans will be safer and healthier because these rules will enable victims of painful and debilitating mental health conditions to seek treatment before they actually commit harm to others,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said on a conference call with reporters. He held a hearing by a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that questioned the delay.

Patrick Kennedy, the former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island who was a sponsor of the mental health law, today said the rules could be meaningless unless insurers are forced to obey them.


“The rule really is only as good as the monitoring and enforcement that goes along with it,” he said on the Blumenthal conference call.

The rules apply to almost all health plans in the nation including new ones sold under the health-care overall known as Obamacare.

Sebelius and Obama face criticism from Republicans and some in their own party for the faltering debut of the Obamacare insurance exchanges. The federal website to sell insurance, healthcare.gov, remains plagued by errors and stalls that prevent many people from signing up.


Obama apologized yesterday in an interview with NBC News to people who have seen their current health plans canceled, as insurers replace them with plans that comply with the new law.


To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Wayne in Washington at awayne3@bloomberg.net


To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net

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