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The 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act required large group health plans that provide benefits for mental health to put that coverage on an equal footing with physical health. Two years later, the Affordable Care Act required small-group and individual health plans sold on the insurance marketplaces to cover mental health services and do that at levels comparable with medical services. (In 2016, parity rules were applied to Medicaid managed-care plans, which cover the majority of people in that federal-state health program for low-income residents.)
In a nation where suicide continues to climb, claiming more than 47,000 lives in 2017, such deaths among older adults — including the 2.2 million who live in long-term care settings — are often overlooked.
For years now, the county has been proposing to replace the facility. In June 2018 county supervisors finally approved $2.2 billion to build a replacement with the notable amendment that the new facility would be designed with a focus on mental health and rehabilitation. As reported by The Los Angeles Times at the time, 70 percent of the county jail's population were physically or mentally ill.
Homeless patients made about 100,000 visits to California hospitals in 2017, marking a 28% rise from two years earlier, according to the most recent state discharge data.
More than a third of those visits involved a diagnosis of mental illness, according to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. By contrast, 6% of all hospital discharges in California during that time involved a mental health diagnosis.
After more than 2,000 Missouri children diagnosed with mental illness were shifted from traditional Medicaid into three for-profit managed-care companies, the state's hospitals noticed an alarming trend: a doubling in the percentage who had thoughts of suicide or attempted suicide.
PARKLAND, Fla. — In the span of one week, two teenagers have died by apparent suicide in this Florida community still grieving the loss of 17 teachers and students in a deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year.
With heightened awareness of college students' psychological stress, worried state officials and campus leaders in California are providing more money and expanding programs to promote mental health.
The first drug for women suffering postpartum depression received federal approval on Tuesday, a move likely to pave the way for a wave of treatments to address a debilitating condition that is the most common complication of pregnancy.
In the wake of high-profile school shootings, many schools over the past decade have invested scarce educational funds into putting more police in schools. School districts have shown a near obsession with "hardening" schools despite federal data revealing that the real crisis of schools isn't violence, but a broad failure to hire enough support staff to serve students' mental health needs.
In a scathing decision released Tuesday, a federal judge in Northern California ruled that a unit of UnitedHealth Group, the giant health insurer, had created internal policies aimed at effectively discriminating against patients with mental health and substance abuse disorders to save money.