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February
12, 2007 – U.S. Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Pete
Domenici (R-N.M.), and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) today introduced
breakthrough mental health legislation to ensure greater health
insurance parity for persons with mental illness.
The Mental Health
Parity Act of 2007 represents the culmination of more than
a year’s negotiations involving lawmakers, mental health,
insurance and business organizations to craft compromise legislation.
The new policy would build on the landmark 1996 Mental Health
Parity Act, a law authored by Domenici and the late Minnesota
Senator Paul Wellstone that began the process of ending health
insurance discrimination against people with mental illness.
The bill does not
mandate group plans to provide any mental health coverage,
but it does require health insurance plans that offer mental
health coverage to provide that coverage on par with financial
and treatment coverage offered for other physical illnesses.
The legislation
would provide mental health parity for about 113 million Americans
who work for employers with 50 or more employees. It will
ensure that health plans do not place more restrictive conditions
on mental health coverage than on medical or surgical coverage.
As such it would require:
· Parity for financial requirements like deductibles,
co-payments, and annual and lifetime limits
· Parity for treatment limitations such as the number
of covered hospital days and visits.
The 1996 Mental
Health Parity law only provided parity for annual and lifetime
limits between mental health coverage and medical surgical
coverage. The new bill expands parity by including deductibles,
co-payments, out-of-pocket expenses, coinsurance, covered
hospital days, and covered out-patient visits.
Click
here to access the full press release.
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