Comments on: Mental Health Parity Loopholes

By: Amy

Amy — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:32:19 +0000

I personally feel my son has been screwed with this new law as many other children will be. My prior coverage through insurance for mental health coverage did not need to meet a deductible and got 20 visits a year at 100% coverage. Now with this new law I have a $750 deductible has to be met first, then 30%of each visit. Sure he can have as many visits he wants, but only if my orange tree starts growing money. What good does as many visits as I want do, if I can not afford them. At $120 bucks a visit, even if I only send him once a month, would take me 6 months to even get to the 30% I am a single mom and I for one do not have this kind of money. So who loses?? my son does. Cause if I paid for that then that would take food away from our table.

By: aqua01

aqua01 — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 01:12:14 +0000

I have been paying out of pocket expenses for psychiatric care of $1100.00/year. It is unfair that participating providers only spend 10 minutes with a bipolar patient. To manage our medications properly, it takes almost an hour.

In addition, general practitioners do not want to deal with psychiatric medications even though they can raise your blood sugar, cholesteral, pulse rate, etc. They want to treat the symptoms, not the cause. There should be a way to make the GP work with the patient’s psychiatrist in order to get reimbursement for treatments necessary due to medication symptoms. Maybe then they would pay attention and become better informed.

By: kimbriel

kimbriel — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:05:02 +0000

California has had mental health parity for a while now so I’m not sure why they chose to survey Californians about the “new” mental health parity law.

I personally think a big flaw in the assumptions with mental health parity is that people assume that more treatment = a better outcome, which, as we saw in the Harrow and Jobe study published in 2007 in the Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease, is just not necessarily the case.

By: Bobbi J

Bobbi J — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:51:07 +0000

I was caught in a loophole when I had to leave my job of 9 years for mental health and physical health issues. I had worked in and had my insurance through the State of NH “Anthem”. NH state law says that ‘a biologically based mental health diagnosis can not be a limited number of visits or dollar capped’. This allowed me to be in a controlled environment as needed, when the local hospital felt they could not address my needs, a transfer to a highly renowned specialty, private hospital in Mass. was arranged- After a total of 16 weeks as an inpatient, my insurance ended (my employer had been paying the full premium for the entire time).I never saw a bill for any of it! I was able to get insurance through my husband’s employer- “Anthem” again, but his employer was based in Ohio, so they said they could put limits on my treatment- 10 in-patient days per benefit year and 20 out-patient visits(which include medication checks AND therapy). I used my benefit for the year within 2 months! I am hoping that these new federal laws will change that. I have had to be on the state’s ‘medicaid’ since the change, because my bills are so large.

By: R

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:18:44 +0000

There are also ways for employers to get around having to have parity in their health insurance and possibly have slightly higher premiums. My university where I am a graduate student only provides individual policies to purchase (through one specific company- so it might as well be a group policy). But because it is not a group policy and we are required to have health insurance we get very little mental health coverage ($300/psychotropic medications $500/therapy, per year). It doesn’t cover anything really especially since none of the providers in the area are on their panel since there is such low reimbursement. UGH!