WASHINGTON — The Senate passed legislation Tuesday night that would require equal health insurance coverage for mental and physical illnesses when policies cover both.
The bill, which passed by unanimous consent, moves advocates one step closer in their years-long quest for a concept known as mental health parity.
Passage came on the same day that supporters inundated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, urging a vote on mental-health parity legislation in the House.
The call-in was organized by Wellstone Action, a group founded to carry out the work of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., who had championed the legislation for years. The House version is called the “Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act.”
Wellstone Action is urging a House vote by the middle of next month. The bill has 270 co-sponsors, more than half of the House membership.
In 1996, Paul Wellstone and Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., won passage of a law banning plans that offer mental health coverage from setting lower annual and lifetime spending limits for mental treatments than for physical ailments.
Both the House and Senate bills would build on that by adding things like co-payments, deductibles and treatment limitations, a longtime goal of Wellstone’s. He died in a plane crash in 2002.
The Senate bill was sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., along with Domenici and Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.
Originally, that bill called for pre-emption of state parity laws in treatment limitations and financial requirements, causing a rift between supporters of the House and Senate bills. The Senate bill dropped that provision, but Wellstone’s son David, who is co-chairman of the Wellstone Action board, argued the House bill was still superior because it specifically says that state laws will not be pre-empted.
The House version also specifies that if a plan provides mental health benefits, then it must cover conditions provided by the health plan with the highest average enrollment of federal employees. The Senate legislation does not include that language.
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