Mental Health Parity Amendment

The seven hundred billion dollar bailout for Wall Street bankers also included a lucrative gift for psychiatric self-interest groups. An amendment to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 requires health insurance companies to cover the treatment of mental illness and addiction in the same way they handle cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. This is called parity.

However, Jeffrey A. Schaler and Richard E. Vatz point out in the pages of The Baltimore Sun that this backdoor change to the nation’s medical care system is both controversial and very expensive. They write that, “Quietly slipping the parity requirement into the financial bailout bill legislatively resolves a half-century of contentious debate over the definition of ‘mental illness,’ whether ‘psychiatric disorders’ are medical disorders, and the nature of addiction. What it does not resolve are the many valid objections to the whole concept of parity - objections that have never been satisfactorily answered.”

Cross posted on The Trebach Report