The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is looking to bolster the behavioral health workforce and test out new payment models in effort to improve mental health parity and access.
It’s part of HHS’ recently released roadmap, which gives guidelines about integrating mental health and substance use care into whole-person care.
The roadmap outlines three main priorities to fulfilling these goals: strengthening system capacity, helping to connect more people to behavioral health care and building health environments to promote mental well-being.
“From Wilmington, Delaware, to Seattle, Washington, and cities and towns in between, I have heard directly from Americans and their providers about our nation’s behavioral health care challenges – including the pervasive and persistent disparities in access that exist across the country,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “In order to ensure equity in access to affordable, high-quality, culturally appropriate care for mental health and substance use, we must fully integrate behavioral health into the larger health care system and other systems. This Roadmap provides a path for getting there.”
HHS named a long list of actions the Biden administration has taken to help achieve these goals. For example, the White House pledged $47.6 million for school-based behavioral health grants, $79.1 million in overdose prevention grants and $13 million to expand behavioral access to Americans in rural areas.
Looking ahead, HHS is focusing on building “a more diverse workforce prepared to practice in integrated settings,” which could take place outside of a typical health care setting.
The roadmap also highlighted the need for more affordable behavioral health care, specifically in at-risk populations.
“Making care more affordable involves a range of public and private health care financing arrangements, which differ in many ways – the beneficiaries they serve, the services they reimburse, the provider types included in their networks, and more. Affordability of behavioral health services is limited by both supply-side and demand-side funding factors,” the report stated.
The lack of adequate reimbursement and other factors has led to a mental health provider shortage in some networks.
While there has been some progress in mental health parity there is still a long way to go.
“On the demand-side, while the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) represent historic achievements that together have driven substantial progress towards narrowing gaps in patient cost sharing and other treatment limitations between M/SUD services and other medical services across a range of health plans, further efforts are needed to close these gaps entirely and fully realize the goal of parity,” the report stated.
In addition to more funding for community-based mental health programs, the roadmap also encourages CMS to test payment models “that leverage behavioral health integration to support the delivery of whole-person care.”
Mental health parity is a hot topic in the industry. The class-action lawsuit Wit v. United Behavioral Health, which alleged that United Behavioral Health improperly ignored generally accepted medical standards when it developed rules for determining the medical necessity of behavioral health standards, has been bouncing around district and now federal courts for nearly a decade.
The case could set a precedent for other cases in the future.
