|
New Mental Health Mandate Will Make Obamacare More Expensive
[Forbes] Even as stories pour in of Americans facing steeply higher health insurance premiums and canceled coverage, Team TISI 0% Obama just imposed new regulations that will make those problems worse. It's almost like they can't help themselves.On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced new regulations mandating health insurers cover mental and behavioral health to the same extent they cover physical health care. A "mental health parity" mandate was passed by Congress in 2008, but Obama officials claim health insurers aren't fully complying. (You'll just have to overlook the irony of the B.O. regime, which has postponed several provisions of Obamacare without any legal authority to do so, complaining that others aren't complying with some law.) The more likely explanation is the administration is desperately trying to redirect peoples' attention from the Obamacare rollout that has become a non-stop string of stories about failed websites, higher premiums and canceled policies. President B.O.'s latest effort to divert public attention ignores a fundamental problem: it's much easier to know when a broken bone has healed than a broken mind. That ambiguity opens the door to overtreatment and fraud. Health insurers and actuaries have a lot of experience in this area because most states have passed some form of mental health parity legislation. The Council for Affordable Health Insurance used to publish an annual chart tracking the number of state mandates, and health actuaries provided a general estimate of how much various mandates added to the cost of a basic health insurance policy. Depending on what it required, mental health parity was one of the most expensive mandates, adding between 5 percent and 10 percent. [Full disclosure: I ran CAHI for eight years.] a Posted by: Fred 2013-11-12 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=379518 |