The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act evaluation study: Child and adolescent behavioral health service expenditures and utilization

Abstract

This study explores possible associations of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) with child access to behavioral health (BH) services (preimplementation ¼ 2008-2009, transition ¼ 2010, and post ¼ 2011-2013). The study sample included children aged 4-17 years in selfinsured "carve-in" plans from large employers. In "carve-ins," BH and medical care are covered through the same insurance plan. The unit of analysis is the person-month (N ¼ 61,823,533). This study employs an interrupted time series model allowing for intercept and slope changes for the transition and postparity periods. Outcomes included total, plan and patient out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditures, and several categories of service utilization. Generalized estimating equations were used to account for clustering. There were significant increases in total and plan expenditures postparity. To illustrate, in July 2012, mean per-member-per-month total expenditures were predicted to be $5.65 without parity but $8.72 with parity. Patient OOP costs did not change significantly. Significant overall increases were seen for utilization of most outpatient services but not intermediate or inpatient services. Our findings suggest that the introduction of MHPAEA was associated with an increase in specialty BH service access for children without a commensurate increase in financial burden for families.

Adolescent Psychological Assistance Treatment Strategy Integrating Home-School Coordination and Network Information

“…In the speech therapy programs such as improving improper cognition and correcting their behavior habit errors, the mainstream traditional programs include psychosocial therapy mode and conversation mode therapy. The main treatment processes are as follows: first, mainly understand the mental and psychological conditions of patients from the social level and then, from the psychological dynamics, conduct a comprehensive analysis on the causes of mental health problems and the corresponding patients at the physiological level, and finally, provide a comprehensive, multilevel, and multiangle treatment scheme for adolescent patients [ 7 , 8 ]; at the corresponding drug treatment level, the current main drug treatment includes mild drug treatment and severe drug treatment, and the main drug used is psychotropic drugs. In addition to the above treatment schemes, the corresponding cognitive behaviour treatment scheme is also popular and reliable, but this treatment scheme is usually combined with drug treatment for comprehensive treatment.…”

Contextual determinants associated with children’s and adolescents’ mental health care utilization: a systematic review

“…In this review, there was evidence of a positive association between parity laws and mental health care utilization [ 42 , 79 , 91 , 98 , 104 ]. Mental health parity requires insurance coverage for mental health conditions, including substance abuse disorder treatment to be equal to coverage for any other medical condition.…”

What Do We Know About Depression Among Youth and How Can We Make Progress Toward Improved Understanding and Reducing Distress? A New Hope

“…We are encouraged by several developments that seek to address barriers to care across ecological levels. At the policy level, the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which was expanded under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, mandated that most health insurance providers guarantee reasonable coverage for mental health care services (Block et al, 2020 ). Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education) is a federally funded program that supports the development of school-based prevention, screening, and early intervention services, incentivizing stakeholders to integrate evidence-based services in youths’ naturalistic settings.…”