Whenever people become delighted that we might finally legislate mental health parity (mental health care is treated as any other illness without a cap on dollars or number of visits per year) I find myself twitching just a little bit, and licking the bottom of the valium bottle. 

That's because mental health parity is another great example of insurance companies playing at helping the consumer find cost savings and supporting health maintenance but not delivering.

When I was negotiating health care benefits for my company the benefit directors in my town were invited to an annual lunch where we were to learn about what's next in insurance.  The event, sponsored by Blue Cross/Blue Shield in my state, was a day of coffee, conversation with others in our field and maybe to meet the "greats" of BCBS who cared about us so much they took the time to attend our little luncheon.

We would be treated to a series of lectures about why all our premiums were going to go through the roof at renewal, and why it was really all our employees fault.  

Since the theme for the past few years had been our premiums were going up because our rotten staff was insisting on taking the medications their doctors prescribed, this year they were looking for a fresh approach. Since so many more people were already using generics and our costs still weren't going down, it was time for a new group of employees to blame.  And who better than the frazzled, exhausted and stressed-out to make the bad guys.

During the course of the day they spent a lot of time talking about how stress leads to more serious illnesses. This made sense to us because we in HR were the ones everyone was going to hate when we stood up and told the employees how much more they were going to pay for the same care. No one had to convince the "our lady of the peptic ulcers and HR" gracing the big round tables that stress was a killer.

They even had an actuary come up and give us a bunch of numbers on a spread sheet showing just how much stress related illnesses became more serious illnesses.  it was very impressive.  And those of us who were wrecks ourselves, but never had seen a shrink got to feel all righteous. Sort of like we were willing to loose our minds for the good of the company.