Search Terms: mental, health, parity
Document 130 of 208.
Copyright 1999 Denver Publishing Company
DENVER ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
June
19, 1999, Saturday
SECTION:
Editorial; Ed. FINAL; Pg. 57A
LENGTH:
338 words
HEADLINE:
FIFTY MODELS, NOT ONE
BODY:
When Tipper Gore preached at a White House conference recently that it's important to understand that mental illness is an illness like any other, she was repeating what millions of Americans have come to understand. Not only have larger percentages than ever before sought help for their afflictions in recent years, the stigma that once attached to such maladies has been slowly but surely evaporating.
That's not to say that the conference was pointless. The vice president's wife has herself suffered from depression, and her public acknowledgment of the fact - along with other experiences related at the event - may help eradicate those prejudices about mental illness that yet persist. Additional enlightenment cannot hurt anyone. What could hurt quite a few people, however, would be enactment of a proposal that President Clinton chose the occasion to reiterate. He wants the federal government to mandate
parity
in
health
insurance coverage of
mental
and physical illnesses.
As is true of almost all Clinton proposals, this sounds good on the surface: Just make those big, bad insurance companies do what's right and everything will be OK. But even a bare-bones analysis shows this idea is a bad one. If the insurance door were open to his list of mental- illness complaints - many of which are unverifiable through any physical evidence - insurance costs would increase by many billions of dollars. Something, somewhere would have to give. Either premiums would rise - perhaps dramatically - or care would have to be rationed. There is no third option.
In the end, more people might be hurt than helped.
The better answer is to do leave these issues to the states and to interactions between the insurance companies and their customers. If some of the states make mistakes one way or the other, the other states can learn from that. By this method, Utopia may not arrive next week, but the evolution of a workable, sustainable system has a far better chance than under what Clinton envisions.
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June 22, 1999
Document 130 of 208.
Search Terms: mental, health, parity
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