Around California, people with mental illness—and their family members—describe pleading with insurance providers for treatment.
Their stories share an underlying premise: Despite policy advances in the past two decades intended to compel insurance companies to provide patients with equivalent levels of care for physical and mental illnesses, the reality on the ground still looks very different.
A statewide poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the California Health Care Foundation found that the top health issue Californians want their governor and legislature to address in 2019 is ensuring mental health problems can get treated: 88 percent called it extremely or very important. More than half of those surveyed thought their communities lacked mental health providers, and that most people with mental health conditions are unable to get the services they need.
Analyzing data from 42 million patients, the healthcare consulting company Milliman Inc. foundthat California patients in 2015 were more than seven times as likely to get treatment for mental health and addiction from providers outside their insurance plan’s network as patients seeking medical or surgical care. The analysis also showed that insurers in California paid primary care providers almost 28 percent more for office visits than they paid behavioral health providers.
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