When the U.S. Senate votes this evening on a $700 billion bailout plan aimed at boosting the struggling economy, it will also consider mental health parity legislation that Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and others have pushed for years.
Domenici’s office announced today that the mental health parity legislation had been added to the bailout bill that will be voted on tonight. It “was a decision made by the leadership, in consultation with other senators,” Domenici spokesman Chris Gallegos said, adding that, “Domenici supports the Senate package to be voted on today.”
Gallegos said the adding of the mental health legislation doesn’t mean a lot of extras are being slipped into the financial bailout bill. He said the legislation that will be voted on tonight includes the economic bailout proposal, a range of tax relief proposals and the mental health parity legislation.
Domenici introduced the first bill to require insurance companies to provide parity between mental health and other medical benefits in 1996. His bill passed and was signed into law. But it didn’t provide full parity, so Domenici, Democratic Sens. Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy and others have been working to expand the legislation to require full parity and close loopholes. During a visit to Las Cruces several weeks ago, Dodd said he wanted to pass the legislation before the end of the year, when Domenici will retire.
The House and Senate have both approved the legislation, but, according to an editorial published today in the New York Times, mental health parity “requires a final shove because the measure is snarled in a broader legislative struggle over how to pay for tax revenues that would be reduced by this measure and others.”
Sticking the legislation into the bailout bill is an attempt to give it that final shove.
“Congress is within a whisker of passing a sound and fair-minded bill to require that group health insurance coverage for mental illness and substance abuse be provided on the same terms as coverage for physical illnesses,” the Times editorial states. “It would be a shame if the legislation, which caps more than a decade of struggle to achieve mental health parity in insurance coverage, were allowed to die while Congressional energies are focused on the all-consuming economic crisis.”