Elected officials spoke on Tuesday in support of a bill that seeks to hold health insurers accountable and comply with federal regulations that require parity in mental health services.
The legislation, originally drafted as HB 6145, is a repeat effort of a bill that failed to move forward in 2024.
“It’s great to get the band back together, I guess you could say, because we’re not going to stop until we pass this bill,” Comptroller Sean Scanlon said as he took the podium on Tuesday, with a dozen supporters of the bill gathered around him. “We are in the midst, here in Connecticut, and across the United States, of a full-blown mental health crisis.”
Scanlon played a part in passing a 2019 bill that demanded such parity when he was a state representative. At the time, the bill passed unanimously, and Scanlon said he proudly displays a photo of Gov. Ned Lamont signing the legislation in his office. But Scanlon said that he’s learned that such problems are rarely solved with any single bill.
“In the six years since this bill was passed, guess what? The people who make a lot of money in the insurance industry have figured out ways around that bill,” Scanlon said.
The 2019 law requires insurers to submit annual reports that detail their services for mental health and substance abuse disorder. But according to Cristian Damiana, Public Policy Manager of Mental Health Connecticut, those reports are often incomplete and the information that is provided can be difficult to weed through.
“What happens is these insurers are doing a large data dump on the state, saying ‘here are hundreds of pages, sort through them,’” Damiana said. “Year after year in the reports, some are not elaborating on the question or, worse, they’re entirely blank, so that suggests that maybe they’re not complying with the reporting requirement in good faith as they should be.”
The new bill seeks to give the law teeth by allowing the Insurance Commissioner to penalize insurers.
Attorney General William Tong said that the mental health parity law is “not optional.”
“It’s the law and you have to follow it. And it’s our understanding after a few years now of getting information from insurance companies who are reporting anonymously that the industry and pockets of the industry are not compliant with the law. They are out of compliance. They are not following the law. They are breaking the law. And so this is our effort to make sure that everybody here in Connecticut and around the country follows the law.”
Despite the number of legislators who have signed onto the bill, the co-chairs of the Insurance and Real Estate Committee, Sen. Jorge Cabrera, D-Hamden and Rep. Kerry Wood, D-Rocky Hill, are not co-sponsors. The Insurance and Real Estate Committee failed to take votes on a single piece of legislation in 2024. At the time, House Speaker Matthew Ritter, D-Hartford, blamed the failure on “strong personalities” and “adversarial relationships,” and Wood said that there was a “willingness to negotiate on all different kinds of bills, but we lost track of time and weren’t able to get it done.”
Rep. Cristin McCarthy Vahey, D-Fairfield, said that she hopes to be able to work with them to move forward together. “We have been having conversations with the leaders of the Insurance Committee, so I also don’t want anyone to think that’s not happening.”
“It’s no secret that this bill died last year as a result of the Insurance Committee deadlocking,” Scanlon said. “There was a sentiment in 2024 that we didn’t need to do this because the law didn’t need changing.” But Scanlon said that there is much evidence to the contrary.
Dr. Katherine Kennedy, a clinical professor at Yale who has a private psychiatric practice, spoke from personal experience about the challenges of getting reimbursed by insurers.
“When we are forced to fill up our minutes, our hours, our days, with high, uncompensated administrative burdens, with frequent and arduous prior authorization demands, with ill-informed interference in our medical decision making, with improper denials of claims, guess what happens? We reduce the number of patients we see, because the administrative tasks just take up too much time, or we stop being in-network providers and go private pay. Our headaches go away, but our patients face higher out of network costs. Or, some of us burn out and stop practicing altogether.”
Kennedy said that patients who cannot access help may not find care, end up in crisis and even die.
Loretta Jay, a special education advocate, echoed Kennedy’s remarks from her work trying to get help for children with behavioral health needs.
Jay described the situation of one child who needed a therapist. Together with Jay, the child’s mother contacted 27 therapists who accepted their insurance, only to find that none was accepting new clients. The child was stuck at a higher, more expensive level of care and experienced suicidal ideation. The mother ended up taking three weeks of family leave to support her.
“Mental health care is health care. The disparity between the two greatly harms our community, both financially and emotionally,” Jay said. “We need enforcement of the existing parity laws so insurance coverage is fair and our community is protected and cared for.”