Senate OKs expanded coverage for mental disorders

In what could be the nation's best protection for mental-health treatment, a bill to outlaw unequal insurance coverage for mental illness passed the state Senate on Friday. The measure was sent to Gov. Christine Gregoire for her signature.

The Senate voted 41-3 to require health plans sold to individuals and to companies with 50 or fewer workers to cover psychiatric disorders equally as any medical conditions. The House passed the measure 75-22 last month. Gregoire was expected to sign it into law as early as next week.

The unexpectedly one-sided Senate vote Friday comes two years after the state first signed a similar law for large employers, and nearly a decade after mental-health advocates first began pushing for such parity.

"We will leap to the top" among the 38 states with parity laws, proclaimed Randy Revelle, a former King County executive who has been taking medication for bipolar disorder for more than 30 years. He has been fighting for such laws in Washington for years.

"I'm emotionally exhausted," said Revelle, now a senior vice president with the Washington State Hospital Association, just after the Senate vote.

Under the parity law, which would take effect in January, health plans would have to apply the same co-payments and out-of-pocket spending caps to all mental, surgical and medical procedures. After July 2010, all deductibles must be uniform, and insurers could not cap the number of psychotherapy sessions and other mental-health treatments unless they applied those caps to all medical conditions.

The parity law would not apply to self-insured employers, such as Starbucks, Boeing and The Seattle Times Company, although some companies are voluntarily expanding their mental-health coverage.

In all, the parity law would apply to about 2 million of Washington's 6 million residents. Drug addiction and other substance-related disorders would not be covered by the law.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of the new law would be individual insurance buyers. No health plans in Washington currently sell individual policies with mental-health benefits. Patients with severe mental disorders that require prolonged treatment also would gain, because some limits on how much psychiatric treatment is provided would be lifted.

A quarter of American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year, according to a 2005 study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. A quarter of those people had serious illnesses, which included substantial disability or limitation, or attempts at serious violence to themselves or others.

Anxiety disorders are most prevalent. But mood disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder were most likely to be debilitating, with 45 percent of the people with those conditions suffering seriously.

Kyung Song: 206-464-2423 or ksong@seattletimes.com