The Mental Health Parity Index is a new data tool that is pulling back the curtain on how commercial insurers actually cover mental health and substance use treatment—and the picture is sobering. Launched in collaboration with the American Medical Association, The Kennedy Forum, Third Horizon, the American Psychological Foundation, and Ballmer Group, the Mental Health Parity Index uses insurers’ own data to track coverage metrics in real time. For the first time, advocates and policymakers can see where mental health and addiction care falls short compared to physical health across plans and states.
Early findings from the Mental Health Parity Index are striking: among the four largest commercial insurance plans, 43 states show clear disparities in access to in‑network mental health and substance use disorder care relative to physical health services. In other words, even when people have insurance, it is often harder to find an in‑network therapist or addiction specialist than it is to find a primary care doctor or surgeon. The Index also shows that patients in 7 out of 10 U.S. counties face difficulties locating in‑network clinicians for mental health and substance use care.
These deficiencies in parity matter because they translate into delays in care, added costs to consumers, and patients dropping out of care; the index gives regulators and legislators a concrete indicator of where high needs exist that insurers are able to cover in a given state and facilitates holding them accountable under today‘s parity rule, which can discern where the greatest problems are and hold the insurance industry accountable through the study of trends in network inadequacy, reimbursement, and utilization rather than through complaints alone.
The Index provides clinicians with evidence to justify years of frustration resulting from poor reimbursement and limited networks that have thrown them out of insurance panels. For patients it may at least be a source of comfort if they had ever experienced repeatedly calling three dozen providers to be told those sweet lines out of network, I am not accepting new patients. By exposing the shortcomings, the Index wants to lighten the individual‘s load and to blame it on a system that must play by the rules.
According to the AMA’s April 17, 2006 advocacy update, the Mental Health Parity Index is just another part of “a comprehensive effort to make mental health the same as any other bodily organ, as a basic health care.” With impending federal rule-writing on parity, instruments like this may rise to give enforcement some bite (bites?). For the present, the bottom line is fairly straightforward: progress has been made in addressing the mental health awareness gap, but universal insurance parity remains an unfulfilled goal and datadriven oversight is fundamental to making it a reality.
Source: AMA National Advocacy Update – New Mental Health Parity Index
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