Re: FW: FEDERAL PARITY AMENDMENT

November 30, 2001

Friends,

YES, Parity is still alive, it has not been killed yet.

It has not passed, committee is still working on the bill.

Note the favorable press to our side attached.

Your faxes and e-mails are working!!

In fact NAMI is worried and complaining exhorting their troops to send

in

more

faxes and e-mails to counter all the ANTI-PARITY faxes and e-mails

coming

in!!

SO, what are you going to do about THAT?

EDITORIAL November 26, 2001

No to Wellstone-Domenici health bill

In the name of enhancing workers' access to

mental health benefits, the Senate has approved legislation that is likely

to send health costs skyrocketing and slash other benefits to employees.

The bill, introduced by Sens. Wellstone and Pete Domenici and cosponsored

by at least 65 senators, would outlaw all "disparities" between coverage

of physical and mental health problems in group health plans sponsored

by firms with more than 50 workers. Known as Domenici-Wellstone II, it

is an effort to "correct" problems created by the Mental Health Parity

Act of 1996 (better known as the MHPA or Domenici-Wellstone I), which was

strongly supported by the Clinton administration and what by then had become

a very docile Republican Congress.

The MHPA created a new and shifting set of

access roadblocks to mental health benefits for workers. The National Center

for Policy Analysis has noted, for example, that it barred plans from imposing

lifetime or annual expense limits on mental-health benefits unless they

were also imposed on treatment of physical illnesses. But, because it only

dealt with dollar limits, the MHPA left a loophole permitting plans to

impose other restrictions on mental health benefits, such as higher deductibles.

The House of Representatives this year voted to extend the MHPA, which

was to have expired Sept. 30. That was bad enough. But the Senate-passed

Domenici-Wellstone II bill would go well beyond current law, by prohibiting

health insurance plans from imposing different (i.e., higher) deductibles

or co-payments for mental health treatment.

The overwhelming majority of employees who

have employer-based health insurance have access to mental health coverage;

according to one employer survey published in the journal Health Affairs,

91 percent of small companies (between 10 and 499 employees) and 99 percent

of large firms offer mental health and substance abuse coverage in their

most highly utilized medical plans. But that's not good enough for supporters

of Domenici-Wellstone II, who are demanding that employee mental health

coverage be provided in a manner which is essentially identical to coverage

for physical illnesses. This ignores the reality that insurance companies

need to differentiate between physical and mental health benefits: It is

simply much easier to determine whether a broken leg has been treated than

to figure out if a broken psyche has been mended. If an insurer is compelled

by Washington to write a virtual blank check for mental health benefits,

it is an invitation to soaring costs and abuse something the federal

government is very familiar with. Medicare, for example, saw the average

annual cost for each senior getting such services soar from $1,642 in 1993

to more than $10,000 by 1997. Medicare administrator Ann DeParle

suggested that 90 percent of these patients had no mental illness serious

enough to qualify for such treatment.

The Wellstone-Domenici approach with

its one-size-fits-all federal mandate is a veritable blueprint for

institutionalizing such foolishness in the private sector. And it's obvious

who the victims are going to be: American workers. Mental health coverage

isn't free; if an employer is forced to squander additional resources on

some mental health services of questionable value, that means less is available

to pay for everything else, including things workers actually need, such

as more comprehensive treatment for serious physical illnesses (or, for

that matter, higher salaries and better pensions). Congress needs to jettison

the Wellstone-Domenici approach in favor of more flexible, commonsense

ideas like expanded Health Savings Accounts, which would give individual

consumers more money to spend as they see fit on mental or physical health

care. And President Bush needs to veto any free-standing bill or appropriations

measure containing any version of Wellstone-Domenici II.

Inc.

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November 30, 2001