Mental Health Parity is almost here!

For those of you who don't know what this is, personally it is one of the more important pieces of legislation that has been bouncing around for the past few years. In short form, it means that for any group health insurance plans, benefits for treatment of mental health and substance abuse must be the same as benefits for all other health treatments. Typically health plans limit the number of visits to a mental health provider, cap the number days for in or out patient treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues. It would basically be like your insurance capping the number of sick visits you could have in any one year, or number and length of hospital visits. Ok, this is not to get into that hospitalization days are capped, and yes I do not always agree with that.

This is huge change in the paradigm of how mental health and substance abuse treatment is viewed. For one thing, as most people who suffer with or know someone with a MH or SA problem, it is real, it needs medical treatment and care. Also, many of these "problems" are considered lifestyle issues, not taken seriously, or generally swept under the carpet. It is and can be a very difficult thing to admit to yourself, and then once you do, and try to get treatment, you are stopped because your health insurance plan doesn't have mental health coverage. However, if you had high blood pressure, or pain in your chest, you better believe you would have unlimited access to utilize your health benefits. What is so different between the two? Nothing really, both have physical symptoms, both lead to loss of work potentially, you could die from both. So why is the access to treatment so different?

How about substance abuse issues. Again, a person reaches the point, however they got there, that they have a problem that needs medical attention, or it could potentially slowly destroy their lives. Not allowing access to treatment or having a low number of maximums days for treatment, would be akin to only providing a cancer patient with half the required chemo treatments necessary. Finally, my other big issue is that many diseases or illnesses are often difficult to place in the health vs mental health category. Often insurance companies, because mental health benefits are so less, place illness like anorexia and bulimia in the MH category. Again, we put these people, mostly women, in a position where treatment is not available, and they suffer. Often many patients that fall into any of these categories, slowly loose their lives, work, family, roof, all of it. Health insurance in the US is far from perfect, there are many things that need to be done to improve it. But if the House passes the bill Friday, Mental Health Parity will be real, one step closer to acknowledges these are real health issues with far reaching consequences if left un-treated or under treated.

Whoa, I will get out of network benefit coverage again!