The 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) sought to improve access to behavioral health care by regulating health plans' coverage and management of services. Health plans have some discretion in how to achieve compliance with MHPAEA, leaving questions about its likely effects on health plan policies. In this study, the authors' objective was to determine how private health plans' coverage and management of behavioral health treatment changed after the federal parity law's full implementation.
A nationally representative survey of commercial health plans was conducted in 60 market areas across the continental United States, achieving response rates of 89% in 2010 (weighted N=8,431) and 80% in 2014 (weighted N=6,974). Senior executives at responding plans were interviewed regarding behavioral health services in each year and (in 2014) regarding changes. Student's t tests were used to examine changes in services covered, cost-sharing, and prior authorization requirements for both behavioral health and general medical care.
In 2014, 68% of insurance products reported having expanded behavioral health coverage since 2010. Exclusion of eating disorder coverage was eliminated between 2010 (23%) and 2014 (0%). However, more products reported excluding autism treatment in 2014 (24%) than 2010 (8%). Most plans reported no change to prior-authorization requirements between 2010 and 2014.
Implementation of federal parity legislation appears to have been accompanied by continuing improvement in behavioral health coverage. The authors did not find evidence of widespread noncompliance or of unintended effects, such as dropping coverage of behavioral health care altogether.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 27. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 23 September 2024.
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#1,758,998
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Outputs from Psychiatric Services
#501
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#31,782
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Outputs of similar age from Psychiatric Services
#13
of 54 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 33,493,714 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 94th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 5,511 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 15.7. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 491,608 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 93% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 54 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 75% of its contemporaries.
