Sen. Lesser Applauds Final Passage of Strengthened Mental Health Parity Law

HARTFORD – Today, State Senator Matt Lesser applauded House passage of a bill that strengthens Connecticut’s mental health parity law by allowing the state Insurance Department to issue fines when insurers violate the law, and by expanding the list of health conditions that insurers must immediately cover with the most effective drugs, instead of relying on less-costly therapies first. Senator Lesser wrote the 2019 mental health parity law to ensure that mental health is treated with the same gravity as physical health.

Senate Bill 10, “AN ACT CONCERNING HEALTH INSURANCE AND PATIENT PROTECTION,” passed the House Monday afternoon and now heads to the Governor’s desk for signing.

“Mental health parity has been a goal of mine since I was first elected and I have been working on this legislation for the last six years,” said Sen. Lesser. “I am thrilled to see it land on the Governor’s desk and with his signature, Connecticut will have the strongest law in the country and our residents will have better access to critical, life-saving mental health supports.”

-Connecticut ranks 9th nationally for mental health access, but significant gaps remain:

-21% of adults—nearly 600,000 residents—experienced a mental illness in the past year.

-18% of adults with frequent mental distress couldn’t afford to see a doctor.

-Over 24,000 CT youth with major depression received no treatment at all.

Connecticut has had a mental health parity law on the books since 2000, but insurers continue to violate it with little consequence. Some insurers continue to underpay behavioral health providers compared to medical providers, they delay or deny treatment through stricter prior authorization and utilization review standards, or they maintain inadequate provider networks, forcing patents into costly out-of-network care.

Existing penalties, like a $1,000 fine for group plans, are far too weak to deter large insurers from cutting corners. Without real enforcement tools, an estimated half a million Connecticut residents are being denied the care they’re legally entitled to.

S.B. 10 fills the gaps that have made previous parity laws ineffective by establishing meaningful financial penalties for parity violations: the bill introduces a modern, scalable penalty structure of $100 per product line per day, capped at $625,000 annually per insurer. The bill also gives the Insurance Department the ability to use outside experts for investigations.

S.B. 10 also improves the transparency of which insurers are adhering to the law – and which are not. The Insurance Department relies on insurer-submitted reports which are often incomplete and not independently verified. Some reports omit required sections or lack basic analysis. S.B. 10 allows the release of ‘parity compliance reports’ that don’t contain the overly broad redactions that currently shield insurers from scrutiny.

S.B. 10 also expands the ban on using so-called “step-therapy” – where an insurer tries various less-expensive options before committing to your doctor’s orders – for drugs treating multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis.