For Immediate Release

Contact: Tammy Sun/Kyra Jennings
(202) 547-0001

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- At the urging of President Bush, this year Congress will attempt to cut $10 billion from Medicaid. This reduction would have a devastating impact on people with mental illness, the country's leading cause of disability. In Parity-Plus: A Third Way Approach to Fix America's Mental Health System, the new PPI report released today, Art Levine offers a bold reform plan that would make mental health coverage stronger and more cost-effective, while diminishing the financial burden on the country's strained Medicaid system.

One vital alternative to budget-driven cuts on public programs is to strengthen private coverage, creating "parity" between physical health and mental heath coverage. While parity would ensure that inadequate private coverage does not force people to turn to Medicaid, traditional parity proposals fail to ensure that expanding coverage will deliver better care. Pro-business conservatives and liberal reformers are locked in a political stalemate on the issue, with neither side recognizing that Medicaid improvements and mental health reform must go hand-in-hand.

PPI's new report transcends this debate by offering the concept of "Parity-Plus" as a starting point for real reform. Parity-Plus would strengthen mental health coverage across all types of plans, from Medicaid to employer-based programs. Levine offers specific policy recommendations requiring health insurance companies to provide equal coverage for mental health care, while holding providers accountable for delivering high-quality, cost-effective services. This approach also stresses the utilization of cutting-edge, proven practices to help solve our country's mental health crisis.

"The Parity-Plus plan can re-launch an effort to reform mental health care with a new framework that cuts across ideology and includes accountability, true recovery, and empowerment for mental health consumers," Levine writes.

The report offers five key steps to mental health reform, including:

1. Enact mental health parity with provider accountability. Parity legislation should raise the quality of mental health care, by requiring the disclosure of performance results, not just reimbursement for services.
2. Promote recovery through proven treatments. Federal policy should remove the barriers to using evidence-based practices and deploy them through financial incentives and penalties. Federal health care agencies should also enhance the consumer's role in measuring outcomes.
3. Ensure funding follows the consumer, not the agency. Each consumer in a federally funded program should have an individual health plan developed by them and their families in cooperation with care providers and case mangers.
4. Provide mental health screening to protect children. Early detection and treatment of mental illness can significantly reduce the impact of the disease. Congress should demand the enforcement of existing screening mandates and spend more funds on supporting mental health "first responders."
5. Encourage work, rather than lifelong dependency. Congress should provide flexibility to cover "supported employment" and ensure that people can move from disability to work without losing their medical safety net.

"The nearly 16 million adults and children with serious, disabling mental illnesses and emotional disturbances have been denied something essential: reforms that hold the nation's fragmented, wasteful mental health system accountable for producing meaningful results in their lives," Levine argues. "It is time for Congress to put real reform before budget-driven Medicaid cuts."

The Health Priorities Project at the Progressive Policy Institute seeks to promote the creation of an Information Age health care system that joins individual choice and responsibility with universal access to the information and resources that people need to improve their health. For more information, web users may access PPI, at , or contact PPI's communications office at (202) 547-0001.