Mental Health Matters Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Chair, for years, leaders in mental health and addiction have been sounding the alarm that despite the best intentions, our Nation's mental health parity laws are not meeting the needs and expectations of patients.

Existing mental health parity laws were supposed to ensure that patients access mental health benefits with the same ease as medical benefits under their insurance.

Unfortunately, we know that patients and their families are continuing to struggle with barriers to needed treatment that should be prohibited under existing law.

The 2022 mental health parity report to Congress from the U.S. Department of Labor, HHS, and Treasury found that health plans and insurers are failing to comply with our Federal parity laws at an alarming rate, meaning that plans are illegally denying claims for treatment associated with mental or behavioral health conditions at a time when substance use disorder, depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions are rising rapidly, especially for children.

The legislation we are considering today would implement recommendations to fix this. The Mental Health Matters Act includes my legislation, the Strengthening Behavioral Health Benefits Act, which would bolster the ability of the Department of Labor to effectively enforce the mental health parity laws and provide resources to the Department of Labor to help bring plans into compliance. The goal here is compliance, not retribution.

In their 2022 report, DOL made a series of recommendations for ways Congress can amend ERISA to empower the Department and patients to hold insurance companies accountable to the law. In this legislation today, we are codifying those recommendations.

This will help patients recover funds spent on treatment that their insurance company should have paid for and will empower DOL to require insurance companies to revisit claims that they wrongly denied. It will also allow penalties to be levied against plans that are found in violation of law, which does not exist today. As the old ancient legal maxim says, without a remedy, there is no right.

That is what this bill is doing. It is enhancing people's rights for mental health parity.

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Chair, this is not the first time the executive branch has asked for additional authority from Congress. President Trump's Commission on Opioids issued a report in 2017 which asked for exactly the same reforms. DOL must be given the real authority to regulate the health insurance industry.

``The health insurers are not following Federal law requiring parity in the reimbursement of mental health and addiction. They must be held responsible.'' That is a quote from Chris Christie, the chairman of President Trump's opioid task force.

We are executing on bipartisan recommendations that came from the prior administration and from the Biden administration to create a real mental health parity system in our Nation.

Mr. Chair, I urge passage of the bill.

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