Revised Change to the Mental Health Parity Act

The next change to the Mental Health Parity Compliance Act was the added revised change to the Mental Health Parity Act. In the decade after the passage of the MHPA, many states passed their own mental health parity laws, some going further than the Mental Health Parity Act toward full parity. With this ongoing process, the ‘adding new’ to the MHPA came to be the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (MHPAEA). “The MHPAEA requires group health plans and health insurance issuers to ensure that financial requirements (such as co-pays, deductibles) and treatment limitations (such as visit limits) applicable to mental health or substance use disorder (MH/SUD) benefits are no more restrictive than the predominant requirements or limitations applied to substantially all medical/surgical benefits.”  Basically, this is a law passed that prevents health insurance issuers, who provide substance use disorders or mental health benefits from IMPOSING less favorable benefit limitations on those benefits than on medical or surgical benefits. This step perhaps was the biggest step to the passing of the Mental Health Parity Compliance Act, and to continue possibly where it gets its most notable credit for, the reform that followed in 2010. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act originally were for group insurance coverage and group health plans, however, was reformed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, collectively referred to as the Affordable Care Act to apply individual health insurance coverage. Putting health care insurance coverage as the beacon of mental health change. In result, the MHPAEA maintains the structure of the Mental Health Parity Act protections and adds important new defenses, such as increasing the parity requirements to substance use disorders.