’60 Minutes’ Correspondent Urges Congress To Approve Mental Health Parity Bill

Writing a Dec. 11 New York Times opinion piece "not as a reporter, but as a depressive who is disappointed that Congress continues to allow mental illness to be treated as a stepchild," Mike Wallace, senior correspondent for CBS' "60 Minutes," argues that Congress should pass a mental health parity bill. Wallace writes, "[I]f you suffer from clinical depression or schizophrenia or any one of half a dozen other mental problems, you're stigmatized: you're not really 'sick' enough to merit the same kind of health care" as someone with a "'physical' illness ... It's unfair and it's wrong." Wallace writes that access to mental health care reduces overall claims and then asks whether access to mental health care could prevent "the third most common cause of death among America's youth" -- suicide. "Could more tragedies be averted if parents could afford psychiatric help for their children?" he says (Wallace, New York Times, 12/11). The Senate-passed mental health parity measure, as it stands, would require insurers that provide mental health coverage to offer benefits at the same level as the benefits provided for physical health coverage with respect to both costs (such as deductibles) and access to services. While the previous parity law prohibited private insurers from establishing lower annual and lifetime limits on mental health treatment than on other medical care, a loophole allowed insurers to restrict mental health care access in other ways (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 12/5). The measure is now in a House-Senate conference and Wallace writes that "a few House Leaders don't like it." According to Wallace, the "worthy goal" of mental health parity has already been "realized" by the federal government, which in January gave "equal coverage for both physical and mental illness" to its 3 million employees. He concludes, "Don't the rest of us deserve the same?" (New York Times, 12/11).