Last week, both houses of Congress passed bills prohibiting employers who offer mental health coverage from charging higher co-pays for mental health services than for other kinds of health care. Insurers will have to cover mental illness and substance abuse under the same terms and conditions as other illness. The House passed a stand-alone bill and the Senate included it in another bill.

However, the House and Senate versions needed to be reconciled before they could be sent to the President.

 The MMA had issued an Action Alert urging members to call their representatives to pass the Wellstone bill. If you have not contacted your lawmaker, it's not too late. Send an email by clicking here.

MMA President-elect Benjamin H. Whitten, M.D., also spoke at a State Capitol press conference September 30 to urge passage of the Mental Heath Parity Act.

The Mental Health Parity legislation will end insurer discrimination against the more than 113 million Americans who suffer from mental illnesses, including the nearly 82 million covered under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) who are unable to benefit from state parity laws.

Minnesota passed mental health parity legislation in 1995. The MMA strongly supported extending the parity enjoyed in Minnesota to families across the country.

"I have practiced primary care for over 20 years," Whitten told the group of mental health advocates and state legislators. "I have seen with my own eyes how depression, schizophrenia, bipolar syndrome, addiction and eating disorders destroy families."

Mental illness takes a greater toll than heart attacks or diabetes, he said, but people don’t understand it because it is not visible like a broken leg.

"Just because you can’t measure it, or touch it, or feel it, doesn’t mean it’s not just as real," he said. 

Joining Whitten on Tuesday were state representatives Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis and Rep. Neva Walker, DFL-Minneapolis, calling on Congress to pass mental health parity legislation.   

Mental health advocate Kitty Westin, mother of Anna Westin, addressed the group. Anna Westin suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and anorexia and died at age 21.

"The brain is a physical organ that gets sick like any other organ," Westin said. "Denying care to someone with a sick brain is like denying insulin to a diabetic, or an inhaler to an asthmatic."

Whitten said dealing with patients' untreated mental health problems "is like trying to pick scattered papers off the floor – when what you really need is for someone to close the window."

Also at the dais were mental health advocates Sue Abderholden, executive director of NAMI Minnesota; Ed Eide, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Minnesota; Julie Petersen, representing the Minnesota Psychiatric Society; Deb Cavit, representing Minnesota Association for Children's Mental Health; and Glenn Andis, senior vice president of government programs at Medica Health Plans.