Recently, President Joe Biden and the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Treasury issued new rules meant to ensure that insurance coverage for mental health conditions and substance-abuse disorder has parity with the level of services available for physical health.
The provisions will be phased in between now and 2026, forcing insurers to stop arbitrarily denying coverage for these conditions in a way that they would be barred from doing for, say, a medically required surgery. This is something that all Americans should cheer for; it will benefit everyone in one form or another.
There have certainly been moments when everyone has seemed in agreement about a crisis of a lack of mental health care accessibility, but these moments often come when some group needs to distract from some other policy failure.
If and when gun rights absolutists want to wave off the idea that the widespread availability of military-grade firearms might have had something to do with the latest mass killing, they’ll point to a breakdown in mental health service as the real culprit.
When NIMBYs and others standing in the way of progress on housing construction are asked to answer for the fact that their positions are ballooning the homeless population, they’ll often retort that the real issue is mental health.
These issues are interrelated, but it is crucial to talk about and act on mental health on its own terms, not just as some corollary issue to others.
Our leaders have long understood this, which is why the health parity law is itself already more than 15 years old. These new rules are about ensuring the proper implementation of what’s already on the books, for everyone’s sake.
Perhaps you haven’t required or don’t think you’ll require mental health care, but like with physical health, one’s status is never guaranteed. Many of us will require mental health care at some point, particularly as we age, and especially given research showing that the younger generations are starting off from a worse baseline level.
Throw in the impact of a global pandemic, which will have lasting physiological and psychological impact — including through the continuing scourge of long COVID — and there’s plenty of reason to get serious about ensuring appropriate coverage.
We also know that the ravages of substance abuse are getting more acute, as larger and larger numbers of people die from overdoses and are otherwise sucked in by fentanyl, not to mention the proliferation of legal opioids.
Fortunately, we’ve moved to the point where most policymakers understand that we cannot police ourselves out of this crisis and need a public health approach. That works only if there are public dollars and expansive enough private coverage.
