Mental Illness, The Red Headed Stepchild of the Health Care Industry

Mental illness has long be hidden in the cloak of shame. Families have felt they needed to lie about family members having a mental illness because it has been looked upon as a “shameful” disease rather than a “medical disease”.

Let me clearly state that mental disease is a much a medical disease a diabetes is. Why is it not treated as such? Untreated mental disease is as debilitating and deadly as diabetes. Yet, if treated, those who have either disease can have a long and productive lives.

The insurance industry treats mental disease much different than other medical diseases regarding payments for services and drugs.

Medicare does cover treatment for mental disease but the patient's share is fifty percent of the allowed charge as opposed to the treatment of diabetes at eighty percent.  This often puts an unfair burden upon the patient.

Commercial insurance companies have various way of dealing with the reimbursement.  Many have no benefits allocated to mental disease.  Most have very limited benefits.

The House introduced and passed one bill to help address the parity in mental disease coverage on March 5, 2008.
Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, H.R. 1424.
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h1424/show

Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), the bill’s primary sponsor gives this pitch for the bill on his website:


There is no medical reason to discriminate against mental health, and there is no financial reason either; every credible study of states’ experiences – and that of the 9 million member Federal Employee Health Benefits Program – implementing mental health parity has shown that mental health costs rise minimally, or fall, after the enactment of parity, as people gain greater access to less expensive forms of treatment. The current absence of mental health parity costs our society economically in many important ways, as research shows that better mental health care results in lower costs and savings to businesses in the form of lower absenteeism and higher productivity.

The Senate has also passed a similar version S558 on September 7, 2007.
 http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-s558/show

When will the House and Senate reconcile these two bills and pass it to the President to be signed?  That is if he will.

Neither of these bills address the violence commited against the people who suffer from mental disease.  That is for another post.

So here I am "STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU".