Consumers should be getting mental health benefits on par with those for medical and surgical care, thanks to the 2008 federal mental health parity law . But whether they are actually getting equal coverage remains a question. Some employers have dropped mental-health coverage altogether to avoid having to beef up their offerings. And many patients don’t know enough about their benefits or parity to ask questions about changes. Even those who pay attention to their mental-health benefits may not be well-informed about improvements in coverage, or receive old or inaccurate information when they call their insurer to ask for additional information, according to a small survey of consumers in New York — where there has been a state mental health parity law since 2007 — recently published in Psychiatric Services . “The fact that people cannot get accurate information,

written or verbal, is disturbing,” Vera Oziransky, one of the authors who was the director of research and advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City when she wrote the piece, told the Health Blog. Consumers also reported other obstacles to using mental health services, including longer wait times for visits to mental-health compared to medical providers, and trouble finding high-quality mental-health providers in network, instead forcing them to go outside the network, according to Oziransky, now at the Fund for Public Health in New York. “We hope that that the decades of discrimination are behind us, but we need benefit education and health plan compliance oversight from the government so the law can live up to its promise,” says Oziransky.

Originally posted here: 
Better Benefits Information Needed for Mental Health Parity