Abstract
The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) of 2008 changed the landscape of mental health and substance use disorder coverage in the United States. The MHPAEA's comprehensiveness compared with past parity laws, including its extension of parity to plan management strategies, the so-called nonquantitative treatment limitations (NQTL), led to significant improvements in mental health care coverage. In this article, we review the history of this landmark legislation and its recent expansions to new populations, describe past research on the effects of this and other mental health/substance use disorder parity laws, and describe some directions for future research, including NQTL compliance issues, effects of parity on individuals with severe mental illness, and measurement of benefits other than mental health care use.
Highlights
Insurance benefits for mental health services were far more restrictive than benefits offered for medical/surgical services in the United States
We review the history of this landmark legislation and its recent expansions to new populations, describe past research on the effects of this and other mental health/substance use disorder parity laws, and describe some directions for future research, including nonquantitative treatment limitations (NQTL) compliance issues, effects of parity on individuals with severe mental illness, and measurement of benefits other than mental health care use
We review the history of mental health parity legislation, research on the effects of parity with a focus on research conducted since passage of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (MHPAEA), and discuss some areas for future study
Summary
Copyright c 2018 Emma Peterson & Susan Busch. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information
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