Article on Telehealth, Parity, and Protecting Therapy

This wonderful new article in the American Prospect, The Fight for Mental Health Parity, does a fantastic job outlining the impacts of telehealth and the concerns over what happens to access to care when the public health emergency ends.

The journalist links to our recent webinar on parity and access, sponsored by the Austen Riggs Center, and quoted throughout are our Chair and Co-Founder Linda Michaels, Steering Committee member, Kate Gallagher, Board Member, Brian Hufford, and Advisors, Eric Plakun and Meiram Bendat.

A few nice quotes:

Linda Michaels, a psychologist and the chair and co-founder of the advocacy organization Psychotherapy Action Network, told the Prospect that though teletherapy is “certainly different than being face-to-face,” it has nonetheless helped patients immeasurably in recent years. “The most effective ingredient of therapy, which has been studied and reconfirmed over many decades,” Michaels pointed out, “is the relationship between patient and therapist.” Teletherapy allows for that relationship to flourish.

Alongside other advocates, Michaels and Gallagher are calling attention to the ways that insurance companies and employers have exploited loopholes to avoid offering equal mental health coverage. To these stakeholders, true parity between mental health services and physical treatments means that insurers must honor the terms of their plans and pay for whatever care has been deemed necessary by a treating clinician, not what has been decided by a company’s finance department.

As a psychologist, Gallagher reflected, “it’s easy to fall into a passive bystander position in relation to insurance plans.” She urges clinicians “not to take a back seat, and to take an active role in fighting insurer denials. Otherwise the companies just continue to profit.”

March 2023