Washington, DC – The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC) is working with Congress to address the worsening mental health crisis. ERIC provided comments to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance regarding their request on the best policies to enhance mental and behavioral health care and substance use disorder care for all Americans.
“Large employers have worked diligently to expand mental and behavioral health care options to their employees and families, but they need Congress’s help to do more,” said James Gelfand, Executive Vice President of Public Affairs, ERIC. “Lawmakers must come together to pass bipartisan legislation that will expand access to mental and behavioral health care providers, while also addressing the increased need for patient safety.”
To help lawmakers tackle the mental health crisis, ERIC shared policy solutions highlighted in ERIC’s report, “Prioritizing Employee Mental Health: Solutions for Congress.” Those recommendations include:
- Allowing mental health providers to practice across state lines to improve access to care
- Expanding telehealth benefits for all employees to improve access to providers
- Incentivizing more practitioners to enter the mental health field by increasing education funding and tuition reimbursement
- Requiring provider transparency around the ability to accept new patients, reducing patient uncertainty and frustration
- Integrating multiple health care disciplines through collaboration to provide patients with higher quality care
- Ensuring patients and plan sponsors have access to meaningful provider quality and safety information
- Modernizing health care account rules to increase flexibility for employees and improve access to mental and behavioral health
- Reducing regulatory barriers to encourage employer innovation
- Applying lessons learned from COVID-19 to advance health equity and better prepare for the future
- Encouraging the transition to value-based payments to better manage the costs of mental and behavioral health
ERIC’s comments also called on lawmakers to address needed policy changes related to patient safety as the health care system has lagged in improving infection rates and medical errors. Specifically, ERIC suggested:
- Creating a National Patient Safety Board (NPSB) to eliminate patient safety events in health care settings, including inpatient and outpatient mental health facilities
- Requiring robust patient safety reporting from all health care facilities so patients can easily know what facilities are safe and can best address their health needs
Additionally, ERIC called for allowing those with a high deductible health plan to access worksite clinics – often a patient’s “front door” to the mental health system – under the same cost structure as those in PPO plans, rather than requiring them to pay the full costs of care until they have paid their entire annual deductible.
“Providing patients access to safe, cost-efficient mental and behavioral health care is very achievable through innovation and bipartisan solutions. ERIC and our large employer member companies are committed to working with lawmakers to solve this crisis,” said Gelfand.
Click here to read ERIC’s comments.