Mental Health Parity and Habilitation: Defining Essential Benefits
10/11/2013 8:45am
Speakers:
Cindy Crone
Glenace Edwall
Meg Jones
As states develop and implement the essential health benefits under the ACA, two issues—defining habilitative services and ensuring that mental health services are covered in parity with medical services— have proven particularly challenging. Private insurance plans, the benchmarks for essential health benefits implementation, have limited experience with offering habilitative services. Similarly, the ACA newly extends mental health parity requirements to private insurance plans. In this session, a national expert will provide a framework for the ACA changes, and state officials from Arkansas and Washington will discuss policy options their states have considered to address these two issues.