But wait, you might say, isn’t there a 2008 law that was supposed to address this? Yes. But, it seems it did not. What about the mental health care parity mandates that went into effect in January 2014, under Obamacare? Well, results there can at best be described as mixed.
The Affordable Care Act has boosted the number of Americans with health insurance coverage but has not resolved the disparate way in which many insurers treat the costs of mental and physical health care, according to an April report released by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The report found that federal changes (part of the Affordable Care Act) mandating so-called parity between mental and physical health-care benefits do not, in practice, exist for the vast majority of Americans who are insured.
The Affordable Care Act does not require businesses to provide health benefits to their workers, but applicable large employers may face penalties if they don’t make affordable coverage available. The Employer Shared Responsibility Provision of the Affordable Care Act penalizes employers who either do not offer coverage or do not offer coverage which meets minimum value and affordability standards. In 2016, these penalties will apply to firms with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees. This flowchart illustrates how those employer responsibilities work.
The average person with a plan bought in a marketplace set up under the Affordable Care Act has to pay 46 percent of total drug spending, according to research published Monday in the journal Health Affairs. That’s significantly more than for people with coverage through their workplace, who have to pay 20 percent of the costs on average.
A major jump in health insurance premiums next year for hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans has put state officials and lawmakers in brainstorm mode, figuring out the best way to get a handle on costs in an individual market that is smaller and more expensive to cover than both regulators and health insurance companies expected.
For months now, regular readers know I’ve spent countless hours crunching the numbers in an attempt to figure out the national, weighted average rate increases for individual health insurance market premiums. I’ve dug into the numbers for just about every state, filling in hard data where I can and making educated guestimates where I couldn’t.