Covered California joined leading health officials in San Diego to encourage enrollment in a quality insurance plan and improve access to address an increased need for behavioral health care across the state.
“The pandemic took a toll on us in so many ways, including our behavioral and mental health, which are critical to our ability to live happy, healthy and productive lives,” said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California. “Getting the right behavioral health care starts with making sure people have health insurance with access to quality providers, and that can be done right now through Covered California’s open enrollment.”
Executive Board votes to cut copays to $5, no deductibles
Washington, DC–The DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority (DCHBX) Executive Board unanimously voted to adopt recommendations based on the work of the DCHBX Standard Plans Working Group to help address health disparities in pediatric mental health treatment. Starting in Plan Year 2024, children covered by a standard plan on DC Health Link will only have a $5 copay, with no deductibles, for outpatient mental health visits, including specialist visits, and no limit on the number of visits. Additionally, this vote reduces prescription copays for child mental health care to $5, with no deductibles.
The action taken by DCHBX means that parents who had copays as high as $45 for their children's mental health visits will only pay $5 starting in 2024. Additionally, parents who were paying as high as $25 in copays for even the lowest-cost generic prescriptions for their children, will have only a $5 copay starting in 2024.
Please watch the full video above before reading this entry.
I've been debating about whether to post this for several days now.
My son is on the Autism spectrum. His case is fairly low-level/high-functioning (mostly in the Aspergers Syndrome category, I believe), and most of the time it's not all that noticeable, but it's definitely an issue in certain circumstances...and the video above gives a perfect example.
I've made one or two vague references to a member of my immediate family being in need of mental health services and physical therapy (he also has a mild case of cerebral palsy), but haven't gone into specifics before. This is partly because it wasn't really necessary to the point I was making, but mainly because my wife and I are very protective of our son and don't want him to grow up thinking of himself as an "Aspie" or whatever the label is; he's just himself. However, he's old enough now that I decided to ask him if he's OK with my mentioning it publicly, so here we are.
