Mental Health and the ACA

Here's part of the ACA that the NRA can get behind, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/us/politics/rules-to-require-equal-coverage-for-mental-ills.html?hpw&rref=health&_r=0

Rules to Require Equal Coverage for Mental Ills
By JACKIE CALMES and ROBERT PEAR
Published: November 8, 2013 Comment

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday will complete a generation-long effort to require insurers to cover care for mental health and addiction just like physical illnesses when it issues long-awaited regulations defining parity in benefits and treatment.
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The rules, which will apply to almost all forms of insurance, will have far-reaching consequences for many Americans. In the White House, the regulations are also seen as critical to President Obama’s program for curbing gun violence by addressing an issue on which there is bipartisan agreement: Making treatment more available to those with mental illness could reduce killings, including mass murders.

In issuing the regulations, senior officials said, the administration will have acted on all 23 executive actions that the president and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced early this year to reduce gun crimes after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. In planning those actions, the administration anticipated that gun control legislation would fail in Congress as pressure from the gun lobby proved longer-lasting than the national trauma over the killings of first graders and their caretakers last Dec. 14.

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Now, speaking personally, this is long over-due, and I am glad for it.

That said, I don't particularly care to see the issue of mental illness and gun violence conflated, lest some conclude that people with mental illness are typically violent (though clearly a very small sub-set can be when untreated). More stigma and public fear is the last thing needed.

I "self-treated" my condition for 50 years. I no longer can. I've been in 3 inpatient psyche wards in 2 years, and very nearly a 4th during a manic episode 2 weeks ago. I will no longer hide my condition from the world. Just last Friday, I discovered that my 51 year brother has been struggling with Bipolar Disorder since he was 18. 30 plus years of struggle and I am still the only family member who knows.

I attend a weekly self-help group sponsored by the Depression Bipolar Support Alliance ("DBSA"). I am one of the lucky ones. I have good insurance, the ability to do weekly therapy, see a top notch psychiatrist, and afford most any drug.

But week after week I sit with people who have no insurance (or at least no mental health coverage), who most often can't afford meds, and who come to DBSA peer support meetings because the cost of professional therapy is out of reach. Many are on SSI, which isn't close to enough to live on.

I'm biased. But, for me, this is a civil rights issue. The mentally ill are sometimes brutally discriminated against. The NRA is proposing that I and others like me be forced to register with the states
---like sex offenders!

The suffering I see on a weekly basis on the part of those who cannot afford help for their mental illness is heart-wounding and mind-scrambling. Most suicides by the mentally ill are not born out of the desire to die, but rather the desire to end the pain they feel.

We wouldn't tolerate this lack of treatment for other disabilities. Well, mental illness is covered by the ADA too.

So Hurray for this part of the ACA! It won't be popular, though. Who wants to subsidize goldbricks and weakness, right?

And also, this may upset the economics of "healthy" young people subsidizing others--- because mental illness does strike the young and "outwardly" healthy. But, what is the value of returning so many young people to productiveness (which, on the whole, is easier the earlier the treatment begins).

So, my brain is in open rebellion against me. If my head were wrapped in bandages it might be easier for you to spot me in public. But it would be no easier for me to live with.