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Recovery in the News
Democratic leaders push mental-health insurance parity bill
John E. Mulligan
The Providence Journal
May 3, 2007
WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders yesterday predicted House action this summer on legislation to make insurers cover mental illness on a par with physical ailments, pitting Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy’s bill against a version sponsored by his father, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
The younger Kennedy cast the legislation as a civil rights issue, saying that the mentally ill are among the groups that have yet to be “fully incorporated into the American dream.”
“It is time to end discrimination against people with mental illness and chemical addiction,” declared Rep. Jim Ramstad, R-Minn., co-sponsor of the bipartisan House bill — and Representative Kennedy’s sponsor in the addiction-recovery program that he undertook after a much-publicized car accident one year ago this week.
Kennedy and Ramstad spoke at an outdoor rally on Capitol Hill, surrounded by the House Democratic leadership and scores of mental-health advocates from around the country.
The rally marked the conclusion of a nationwide series of hearings that Kennedy and Ramstad have held to promote mental-health insurance “parity,” always invoking their own recovery from alcoholism — and in the Rhode Islander’s case, drug addiction and mental illness as well.
“Because of the personal generosity of Patrick Kennedy and Jim Ramstad in sharing their stories,” millions of Americans stand to benefit, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi said action by the committees with jurisdiction over the House mental-health parity bill could come this month, with full House passage “on the near horizon.”
The House version of the parity bill is in key aspects more expansive than the Senate version. For example, it requires equal insurance coverage of all the ailments listed in the mental-health profession’s official compendium of conditions.
The Senate bill does not specify the conditions that must be covered.
Among the mental-health advocates on hand yesterday was Elizabeth C. Earls, chief of the Rhode Island Council of Community Mental Health Organizations, who said she prefers the House version of the bill.
Earls said her constituents would most likely fare better under a provision in the House bill that would allow patients to seek certain types of treatment outside the health-care “networks” to which insurers typically restrict their customers.
But Earls said, “I understand the challenges in getting any legislation passed” without the support that the Senate version has won from the medical, insurance and business lobbies.
That bill, whose chief authors include Republican Sen. Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, was cleared for full Senate action in February after months of negotiations among lobbyists from the mental-health field and the various affected industries.
Karen M. Ignagni, the chief of a leading industry group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, reiterated her influential organization’s support for the Senate bill.
Ignagni said in an interview yesterday that every provision that mandates an expansion of insurance coverage “has a cost” that employers and in some cases patients will eventually bear. Health-care networks, she said, help to keep insurance affordable.
Ignagni, like the mental-health advocates at the Kennedy-Ramstad rally, expressed the hope that the Senate and House bills would pass quickly and be sent to a conference committee for compromise talks.
“We want this issue resolved” this year, with a mental-health parity bill signed into law by President Bush, Ignagni said.
© 2007, Published by The Providence Journal Co.