WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden is making new moves to force health insurance companies to improve access to mental health care for Americans who often struggle to find and pay for the care they need, officials said on Tuesday.
The administration on Tuesday will release the text of a proposed rule in the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. Biden will make comments on the plan Tuesday afternoon.
The legislative change will require health plans to make changes when they provide inadequate access to mental health care.
It will provide specific examples that make it clear that health plans cannot use conditional prior authorization, alternative medical management methods or narrow networks that make it difficult for people to access mental health and substance use disorder services.
“Despite repeated bipartisan efforts aimed at mental health reform, insurers continue to make mental health treatment difficult to access, causing millions of consumers to seek out-of-network care at extremely high costs and out-of-pocket, or to withdraw care altogether,” the White House said in a fact sheet announcing the proposed rule change.
The proposed text will be open to public comment for 60 days and administration officials said they expect it to go into effect after that.
A White House fact sheet cited another study that showed that uninsured people are twice as likely to be forced out of network and pay higher costs for mental health care than for physical health care.
“We have learned that insurers are running away from the mandate of the law,” White House domestic adviser Neera Tanden said at a press conference.
A US study in 2017 said that people with severe mental illness, which includes any mental illness severe enough to require treatment, are three times more likely to be too poor to care for themselves and 10 times more likely to be unable to pay for medication.
(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Jamie Freed)
Copyright 2023 Thomson Reuters.
| Daily News Post