The insurance companies would have you believe that if we did cover all kinds of medical care equally, the plan members and businesses that provide the coverage to their employees would have to pay far more for the services than what they pay now. Not true. When laws like this were on the books on the national level during the Clinton Administration, businesses that provided health insurance to their employees saw the costs of such coverage hardly increase if it did increase at all. According to a 2000 report from the United States General Accounting Office, only 3 percent of companies polled regarding their experiences with previous parity legislation said that compliance had increased their benefits plan’s claims costs, and, from looking at studies of cost increases reported in states that didn’t need to follow the federal law because of pre-existing state laws, costs rose no higher than 4 percent. Most employers who had to comply with the law (86 percent) did follow it. What’s more, it was recently estimated that the nation’s overall cost for dealing with depression alone, considering the costs of such factors as direct treatment, absenteeism from work, unemployment, and even suicide, comes to a total of $83 billion, and those of us in the fight for mental health care parity believe that lessened absenteeism among mentally ill employees will make up for whatever cost may be accrued through raised insurance prices if parity were to be enforced.
