Final Mental Health Parity Regulations Released, with Plan Sponsor Action Required by 2025
Last week, the Departments of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services finalized regulations implementing the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (MHPAEA). Although the final regulations step back from certain burdensome aspects of the proposed rules (which we blogged about here ), compliance with the final rules w ill require action from virtually all group health plans that cover mental health and substance use disorder (MH/SUD ) benefits before the end of the year. How did we get here? MHPAEA requires that group health plans that provide MH/SUD benefits cover them in parity with medical and surgical benefits . Evaluation of whether benefits are in parity is performed for each classification of benefits under the plan, and this analysis requires evaluating: (1) financial and other quantitative treatment limitations, and (2) non-quantitative treatment limitations (NQTLs). At the end of 2020, Congress added a require...