Patrick J. Kennedy

We are in a mental health and addiction crisis in our country. About 450 New Mexicans die by suicide each year; one in five of them are veterans. At the same time, New Mexico’s drug overdose death rate has been one of the highest in the nation for two decades.

Every life that was lost – and every life that we stand to lose – is precious and has value. We must provide treatment for everyone who needs it. No one can fall through the cracks.

Mental health is truly a civil right. Our country was founded on the principle that everyone has a right to receive equal treatment and to be free from discrimination. Since our beginnings, each generation has fought to extend the same rights to all Americans regardless of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, and other characteristics. In our time, we recognize that it’s an affront to our common humanity when our friends and family members are denied basic rights because of bigotry and prejudice about mental illness and addictions.

In that spirit, I visited Las Cruces this week to join with former Sen. Pete Domenici at the Domenici Public Policy Conference at the New Mexico State University. Democrats and Republicans are coming together around fixing America’s behavioral health system because this issue affects all of us.

It was this bipartisan approach that drove the passage of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. I was the lead sponsor of the bill in the House of Representatives. Senator Domenici and my father, Sen. Ted Kennedy, shepherded the bill through the Senate.

The Parity Act was intended to outlaw discrimination in insurance coverage. It requires that illnesses of the brain, like bipolar disorder and opioid addiction, be treated the same as diseases of the body, like cancer and heart disease.

With the eighth anniversary of the Parity Act coming up — President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on Oct. 3, 2008 — now is the time to assess whether we are doing all that we can to treat everyone equally.

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Insurers are still denying people experiencing mental health conditions and substance use disorders medically necessary treatments or requiring them to “fail first” at lower levels of care before receiving appropriate services. In fact, insurers deny authorization for behavioral health treatment at nearly twice the rate of their denials for other medical care, according to a study by the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

This is outrageous. It’s time — past time — to enforce the laws we have on the books.

State and federal agencies need to end the secrecy that allows insurers, both public and private, to discriminate against people with mental illness and addictions. Regulators must use the legal powers they already have to demand detailed disclosures of how insurers make their decisions to approve or deny coverage for all medical, surgical and mental health care. Greater transparency is the only way to find out whether everyone is being treated fairly and equally under the law.

State and federal regulators must also conduct random audits of insurance plans to determine whether they are in compliance with the Parity Act and its state counterparts. And certainly, if a plan is the subject of multiple parity complaints, it should be audited.

All of this won’t happen by itself. It’s going to take sustained pressure from ordinary people who care. One thing consumers can do is visit www.paritytrack.org and send an email to their state insurance commissioner and the regional office of the U.S. Department of Labor to urge them to conduct these random audits of insurance companies and to investigate repeated violations of the parity laws.

Just as civil rights workers fought a generation ago, we have to fight now to secure equal treatment for our brothers and sisters experiencing mental health conditions and substance use disorders. Everyone deserves to enjoy a life of love and relationships, of work and contribution. Not some of us, but all of us.

Patrick J. Kennedy is the author of the New York Times bestseller “A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction.” He is the founder of the Kennedy Forum and a former U.S. representative for Rhoad Island.