Our Stories
Share the power of long-term recovery. If you are in recovery, a family member, friend or ally of someone in recovery, we want to hear your recovery story!
Learn more...
Voice of the Recovery Community Award
Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR) is the recipient of The Joel Hernandez Voice of the Recovery Community Award!
Learn more…
|
Recovery in the News
Letters to the Editor
Toward equality: Mental-health bill would improve treatment
Daytona Beach News-Journal Online
October 8, 2007
The word "parity" seems fairly straightforward. It signifies equality, even-handedness, a level playing field.
But the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996 didn't live up to the promise of its name. The law was meant to encourage insurance companies to cover mental illness the same way they handled physical ailments, as a medical problem in need of appropriate treatment. Instead, the law paid lip service to equal treatment while allowing insurance companies to shift most of the cost of mental-health care back to patients.
A bill approved last month by the Senate and awaiting a hearing in the House would tackle the issue of parity in a more honest way, by requiring the same deductibles, co-payments and duration-of-treatment restrictions for mental illness. The Senate bill has significant loopholes: It would only apply to group plans with more than 50 members, for example, and would give insurers the option of excluding mental-health treatment altogether (the parity provisions only kick in for plans that currently make some provision for mental-health treatment). The House version is stronger, but might not pass muster in the Senate. Either chamber's legislation would improve coverage to at least 113 million Americans who don't have access to useful mental-health insurance now.
The need for parity should be obvious. The National Institute of Health estimates that one in four American adults suffers from a treatable mental illness in the course of a year. But fewer than one-third of those people receive treatment. Untreated mental illness is the leading cause of disability for people ages 15 through 44, and more than 90 percent of the people who commit suicide have a verifiable mental disorder.
Obviously, parity legislation can't help them all. It does little for people who have already lost jobs and economic stability because of struggles with mental illness. But parity would help many people who struggle through depression each day to come to work, or scrape up the money themselves to pay for medication that allows them to keep working.
The proposed legislation matches scientific advancements in the treatment of mental illness. As recently as 20 years ago, many common disorders were poorly understood, and psychoactive medications often carried daunting side effects. But as scientists work to unravel the biochemical mysteries at the heart of many mental disorders, therapies have become more targeted and effective.
As research advances, it becomes more obvious that mental illness can -- and should -- be treated like any other ailment.
The pending legislation won't take American workers all the way there. And it does nothing for the 47 million working-age Americans who have no health coverage at all. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, a bigger step than Congress took in 1996.