Our Health Policy Matters

At long last, the Administration has released the final rule implementing the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 . This will extend mental health insurance benefits on a par with medical/surgical benefits to at least 30 million more people.  And, more importantly, we have finally ushered in a 21 st Century response to a set of diseases for which we still often employ 19 th Century treatments – locking the door and throwing away the key. The Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA) was passed in 2008.  Its purpose was to end insurance discrimination against people with mental illness.   For larger group health plans, it outlawed annual and lifetime limits on mental health or substance use disorder benefits when there are no annual or lifetime limits on medical/surgical benefits. And it required that co-insurance and co-payments be substantially the same for both mental health and regular medical/surgical procedures. As it turned out, the MHPA needed t

I admit it.  I have Obamacare fatigue. I’m tired of endless stories about website glitches and the small numbers of people who rushed to buy health insurance three months before it would even go into effect.  But I am most fatigued by the newest invented controversy about the so-called “health-insurance-you-like” policies that have been outlawed because they do not meet even the bare minimum standards established by the law.  That’s right – the American people just love lousy health insurance! Source: NSDUH, 2013 So I thought I would write about something less controversial – drugs.  Because some new facts suggest that if we really want to change a useless federal policy, we will end – as quickly as we can – our failed War on Drugs. President Richard M. Nixon declared “War on Drugs” in June of 1971.   We have been fighting this war for forty-two years now, long enough to determine if it has made any difference in our lives.  It has.  The War on Drugs has loaded up