State Senator Jonathan A. Harris
April 10, 2008
Harris Joins Mental Health Advocates, Declares Mental Health Insurance Parity is “Not Negotiable”
State Sen. Jonathan A. Harris (D-West Hartford), the co-chairman of the Human Services Committee, was joined today by mental health advocates and experts as they demanded that Gov. M. Jodi Rell's proposed Charter Oak Health Care Plan include the mental health coverage that is mandated by a state law for all other insurance policies offered in Connecticut.
"That aspect is not negotiable," Sen. Harris said, referring to the governor's decision to leave mental health parity out of her Charter Oak health plan, which is expected to provide health coverage for several thousand Connecticut adults beginning July 1.
"This is discriminatory. There's no other way to say it," Sen. Harris said. "It's going back millennia in terms of how we think about mental illness, and it's not going forward into the 21st century, which is where Connecticut has been headed in terms of health care coverage."
Sen. Harris and a half-dozen other mental health advocates today urged the governor to reconsider her position on mental health parity in Charter Oak, and they expressed their support for House Bill 5617, which was approved by the Human Services Committee on March 18. Among other things, that bill requires that Charter Oak include comprehensive coverage for mental health services.
Rell administration officials have expressed concern that including mental health parity in the Charter Oak plan would "dramatically increase the target premium" of $250 per month, but several nonpartisan studies have put the cost of mental health parity premiums at just pennies per-person, per-month.
For example, the amount spent by BlueCross BlueShield of Vermont for mental health and substance abuse services increased just 19 cents per-person, per-month. Mental health parity costs in several other states have raised premiums by only a half-percent to 2 percent per-person, per-month.
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