Treatment Funding and Parity

The Milwaukee Addiction Treatment Initiative will advocate for treatment funding reform that ensures that everyone in Wisconsin has access to high-quality health insurance and that insurance companies stop their discriminatory policies and provide addiction treatment to the same level as physical treatment.

Ensuring Everyone in Wisconsin Has High-Quality Health Insurance

Wisconsin leaders have successfully expanded the BadgerCarePlus health insurance program to cover more low-income children and adults, including childless adults, than ever before. Despite this recent expansion, nearly 500,000 people in Wisconsin are still uninsured -- roughly 8 percent of the population. The uninsured suffer from poorer health and higher rates of premature death than insured adults, receive less preventive care and are diagnosed at more advanced diseased stages. The uninsured cannot access sufficient addiction treatment.

Wisconsin needs health care reform. Out-of-control health care costs rising 2-3 times the rate of inflation are sending insurance premiums skyward, forcing business to cut jobs, bleeding government of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, and pushing more and more people off of insurance.

MATI advocates for comprehensive health care reform in Wisconsin, which will:

  • Guarantee that everyone has health insurance with good benefits and a wide choice of plans and providers.
  • Ensure the availability of preventive and chronic care without deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance.
  • Provide that addiction treatment on a parity basis (see below).
  • Include an effective mechanism for controlling the growth of health care costs.

Ending Discriminatory Insurance Policies

Treatment works—while addiction is not curable, millions of people with addictions have been successfully treated. However, insurers routinely discriminate against people seeking addiction treatment by providing limited coverage, restricting the number of visits to treatment facilities and requiring excessive cost-sharing, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.

Addiction treatment should be covered at the same level as chronic physical illnesses such as Type I diabetes, hypertension and asthma. Anything less is discrimination.

The federal Wellstone/Domenici Mental Health Parity Act may bring these discriminatory practices to an end. Passed in October 2008, the law states that insurers who offer coverage for mental health and addiction treatment must offer it to the same degree as physical treatment, i.e. without artificial limits and cost sharing. MATI will be vocal in its support for broad application of Wellstone-Domenici, both to BadgerCarePlus as well as private insurance.