Obama forms mental-health parity task force, CMS announces Medicaid parity rule

President Obama announced this week the creation of a task force on mental health parity — aimed at ensuring that people with mental illnesses and substance abuse problems don’t face discrimination in the health care system (Source: “President’s Task Force Aims To Help End Discrimination In Mental Health Coverage,” Kaiser Health News, March 31, 2016).

“The goal of the task force is to essentially develop a set of tools, guidelines, mechanisms so that it’s actually enforced, that the concept is not just a phrase — an empty phrase,” Obama said during a panel discussion at the National Prescription Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in Atlanta, Georgia. “We’ve got to let the insurance carriers know that we’re serious about this.”

The announcement comes the same week as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a final rule requiring that the millions of beneficiaries who receive services through Medicaid managed care organizations, Medicaid alternative benefit plans or CHIP to be provided access to the same mental health and substance use disorder benefits and protections of private plans.

In a 2015 survey by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group for people with mental illness and their families, patients said their insurance denied coverage because treatment was deemed “not medically necessary” twice as often for mental health as for other medical conditions. Only a handful of states, including California and New York, have been investigating whether insurers are complying with the parity law. Meanwhile, the federal government has taken few if any public enforcement actions.