In making coverage decisions about mental health and addiction treatment, insurers frequently use “their own kind of black box criteria, not knowable to enrollees and not consistent with standards of care,” says Julie Snyder, director of government affairs at the Steinberg Institute, a Sacramento-based mental health policy and advocacy group. A California law that took effect Jan. 1, SB-855, should make it much harder for state-regulated commercial health plans to do so. It requires them to use nationally recognized clinical standards established by nonprofit associations of clinical specialists to determine which mental health and addiction treatments they’ll cover — and for how long.
Read the full article: New California Law Makes It Easier to Get Care for Mental Health and Substance Abuse //
Source: https://khn.org/news/article/new-california-law-makes-it-easier-to-get-care-for-mental-health-and-substance-abuse