NAMI North Carolina Mental Health Advocates Accuse Small Business Group of Misrepresenting Parity to Legislators

News Release

Mental Health Advocates Accuse Small Business Group of Misrepresenting Parity to Legislators

House Subcommittee Scheduled to Review Senate Bill 400 Thursday, July 9

Released July 7, 1998

With the House vote on North Carolina’s mental health parity bill only days away, the state chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) has launched an opposition campaign the bill’s supporters say is based on misleading information.

“NFIB’s arguments against Senate Bill 400 are all based on a false assumption that parity causes significant increases in costs. That’s just plain wrong,” said Beth Melcher, executive director of NAMI North Carolina—one of 28 prominent state organizations supporting parity. “The truth is parity typically results in cost increases of about one percent or less,” she said. “In some places—including our own state—parity has resulted in cost decreases for mental health care benefits. These are documented facts.”

Melcher said she and other advocates and mental health care providers are afraid NFIB’s last-minute “scare tactics” could unfairly influence House members as they begin discussions of Senate Bill 400 in the House Subcommittee on Health Insurance Thursday. “I understand and respect our representatives’ need to be responsive to small business,” she said, “but I hate to think they could be swayed by such a crude, dishonest attempt to sabotage this critically important bill.”

Referring to two NFIB notices to members, Melcher disputed virtually all key points in the organization’s arguments against parity. “NFIB has done its members and their representatives a disservice,” said Melcher. “They’ve presented them with misleading information and encouraged them to use that misleading information to defeat this bill. Time and again, mental health insurance parity has produced positive results for everyone involved. We have every reason to expect the same positive results in North Carolina.”

As North Carolina law now stands, insurers and HMOs can—and most often do—arbitrarily distinguish brain disorders from other types of physical illness and provide less favorable benefits. “Applying different rules to benefits for treating so-called mental and nervous conditions is not only outdated, but patently unfair,” Melcher said. “Based on what we now know about the physiological origins of brain disorders, it’s shameful to allow this type of discrimination to continue.”

Because NAMI North Carolina focuses on helping families cope with mental illness, Melcher has witnessed the devastating results of this unfair discrimination firsthand.

“We realize there are important dollars-and-cents issues involved, but there’s also a very real, often very tragic human cost that comes with our current discriminatory policy,” Melcher said. “We work with families every day who’ve been forced to postpone treatment until symptoms are totally out of control. It’s highly stressful to live with an untreated mental illness for months on end and practically impossible for the average family to pay for the treatment they need on their own—just as most families couldn’t afford to pay for heart surgery or cancer treatment out of their own pockets.”

Melcher said as with many physical illnesses, many brain disorders can be managed most successfully and cost-efficiently with early diagnosis and treatment. “Medically and financially, it’s much better to start treatment as soon as possible after symptoms develop and not wait until they escalate to crisis proportions,” she said.

“Early diagnosis and treatment can also minimize a family’s suffering. The system we have now promotes suffering because it denies access to mental health care. With parity, families will be able to get the treatment they need when they need it without being forced into financial ruin.”