WASHINGTON – Today, Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) issued the following statement after the Department of Labor (DOL), Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of the Treasury issued proposed rules that would make it harder for employers to demonstrate compliance with mental health parity law:
“Employers recognize the need to support the mental health of their employees and have made great strides to expand access to mental health services in recent years. Unfortunately, these proposed rules set employers up for failure when demonstrating mental health parity compliance, focus more on reporting than on workers’ mental health, and are a massive federal overreach.
“First, this administration proposes adding additional vague and burdensome reporting requirements for businesses to demonstrate they are in compliance with mental health parity law. Employers have struggled for the past two years to read the minds of Washington bureaucrats. These rules pile on an already confusing reporting process.
“Second, DOL is using these proposed rules to dictate private reimbursement rates by telling health plans they could risk a parity violation by reimbursing providers ‘at or near Medicare reimbursement rates.’ It is not up to DOL to determine the correct reimbursement for providers. That decision should be made by the private market.
“Third, these proposed rules will impose hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs on businesses, increase premiums, and run the risk of encouraging plans to create more barriers to medical care.
“Unfortunately, the Biden administration is putting paperwork over patients. These proposed rules add more reporting, red tape, and government diktats onto an already broken reporting process.”
