The lack of resources for people when they are at their most vulnerable makes no sense. No doctor would help a patient control his blood sugar or blood pressure once — and then wave goodbye. The same should be true of addiction. It’s a chronic disease that requires long-term, possibly lifetime, care. So why has care been so scarce?
One reason is money. “Insurance didn’t used to cover anything post-discharge,” said Mady Chalk, a former official of the federal agency that provides substance abuse services, Samhsa, and now the director of the Center on Policy Research and Analysis at the Treatment Research Institute, a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia. “There was an admission, treatment and then your discharge. And then people entered into a phase that used to be called ‘after-care.’ After-care is after care.”
This is changing. One reason is the Mental Health and Addiction Parity Act of 2008, which required insurers to treat mental health like physical health in group health plans. Obamacare then expanded the law’s reach to cover individual health insurance plans — and, of course, has also extended insurance to millions more people.
Read Full Article »