Behavioral Health Insurance Parity for Federal Employees

TLDR: When coupled with management of care, implementation of parity in insurance benefits for behavioral health care can improve insurance protection without increasing total costs.

Abstract: Background To improve insurance coverage of mental health and substance-abuse services, the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program offered mental health and substance-abuse benefits on a par with general medical benefits beginning in January 2001. The plans were encouraged to manage care. Methods We compared seven FEHB plans from 1999 through 2002 with a matched set of health plans that did not have benefits on a par with mental health and substance-abuse benefits (parity of mental health and substance-abuse benefits). Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we compared the claims patterns of matched pairs of FEHB and control plans by examining the rate of use, total spending, and out-of-pocket spending among users of mental health and substance-abuse services. Results The difference-in-differences analysis indicated that the observed increase in the rate of use of mental health and substance-abuse services after the implementation of the parity policy was due almost entirely to a general tr...