Advice for Preparing For Parity in 2010

We're on the eve of the implementation of behavioral health parity legislation. Medicare has released the procedures for implementation of parity for their beneficiaries—see “Medicare Claims Processing Transmittal 1843: Outpatient Mental Health Treatment Limitation.” The regulations for the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act will be released in January of 2009, “Wellstone Act Mental Health Parity Effective Date Delayed Until 2010.”

But the various pieces of parity legislation will only be as meaningful to consumers as their implementation. To that end, there is a great piece in the December 2, 2009 issue of Medical News Today, “Lessons From the Implementation of Mental Health Parity in California.” Coauthors Margo L. Rosenbach, Ph.D., Timothy K. Lake, Ph.D.; Susan R. Williams, M.P.P., also affiliated with the Mathematica Policy Institute, and Jeffrey A. Buck, Ph.D., offer three pieces of advice from their research:

• The need for increased oversight of health plans—monitoring health plan performance related to access and quality, in addition to monitoring coverage and costs;
• The need to look at the breadth of diagnoses covered by health plans; and
• The need to ensure consumer awareness of parity—mounting a campaign to education consumers about their insurance benefits.
  

Three points we should all put on our 2010 new year's resolutions!