COLUMBIA - People with mental illness will get more benefits from their current insurance as part of the well-publicized $700 billion rescue package Congress approved last week.
"We're talking about the difference between having to pay 20 percent off as a co-pay versus 50 percent. So that really discourages people from getting help for mental health problems," said Allen Tacker with the Family Counseling Center.
As part of the recent bailout bill, people with psychiatric illnesses no longer suffer discrimination in health care. Missouri adopted a similar state law four years ago.
"But that bill only covered about 40 percent of Missourians' insurance policies," said Cynthia Keele, Executive Director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
The new law helps people with illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, eating disorders and alcohol and drug abuse. Keele says mental illnesses are often highly treatable conditions.
"They don't go away, but you can control it with medication and lifestyle changes," she said.
Untreated mental illness is a major factor in productivity loss and unemployment, emergency room visits, homelessness, broken lives and unnecessary jail time. "
It not only helps their lives, but it helps the lives around them. And ultimately it helps to reduce the costs that the people spend for physical health problems," said Keele.
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