Dive Brief:
- On October 27, the Department of Health and Human Services published a report detailing progress made to date on implementation of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA).
- The report announced several initiatives being undertaken by the government in support of mental health parity. These include state funding ($9.3 million), an online patient portal to submit complaints regarding parity, and a consumer guide to disclosure rights.
- The report also issued recommendations to increase regulatory agencies’ ability to audit health plans for parity compliance, to allow the Department of Labor to issue fines for parity violations, and to expand patient education around parity.
Dive Insight:
Mental health parity has been making waves for years now. MHPAEA was signed into law in 2008, but a final rule for the mental health parity law wasn’t issued until November 2013. This past March, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued regulation aligned with MHPAEA to further efforts to advance mental health parity.
Despite a growing focus on mental health parity, there have not been significant improvements in the quality of mental healthcare over the past 10 years, according to a study published in June in Health Affairs. The study noted only about 5% of metrics included in the CMS Measures Inventory focused on behavioral health.
Many initiatives aimed at modernizing and digitizing healthcare have neglected the realm of mental health. Without requirements for reporting mental health measures, health IT vendors have not had an incentive to design systems with mental health patients in mind. Likewise, lacking funding and access to health IT systems relevant to their needs, mental healthcare providers have been slow to adopt health IT.
While ongoing initiatives announced in Thursday’s report seem well-intentioned, it remains to be seen how far they will go toward creating mental health parity. One of the long-term goals for the agency is to increase Federal agencies’ capacity to audit health plans for parity compliance. HHS could look to New York for an example of a regulator getting aggressive on mental health parity compliance.