Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver. ~Author Unknown
The new guidelines for the Mental Health Parity Act (MPHA) went into effect on January 1 of this year. Federal law now requires insurance companies who cover mental health or addiction treatment must do so equally with the coverage they provide for medical treatment. State and federal governments now spend more than 15 billion dollars each year on substance abuse services. Insurance companies spend at least 5 billion each year. Researchers estimate that approximately twenty million people in the United States need addiction treatment but are not receiving treatment.
The MPHA implicitly recognizes that addiction is a mental health issue and is just as destructive to the physical health of a person as a disease. In fact, physical illness is often the result of untreated addiction. Diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis C, liver cirrhosis or lung cancer are often the result of untreated drug and alcohol addiction.
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