Senate Health Care Bill Fails to Cover
Counselors Under Medicare
The Senate’s health care reform bill,
unveiled November 18th by Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid, fails to
establish Medicare coverage of
licensed professional counselors. This
despite the fact that the Senate has twice
approved Medicare coverage of counselors,
and that Medicare beneficiaries need better
access to outpatient mental health service
providers.
There are more than 110,000 licensed
professional counselors across the country
meeting education and training standards on
par with currently covered providers, and
covering counselors under Medicare is
estimated to cost only $100 million over 5
years, a drop in the bucket in the context
of other Medicare improvements costing tens
of billions of dollars. Senators claim
the bill will make major updates to
Medicare, but the bill misses an opportunity
to bring Medicare’s mental health coverage
policies up to speed with the practices of
private sector health plans, which have
covered licensed professional counselors for
decades. The House-passed version of
health care reform legislation, H.R. 3962,
includes Medicare coverage of state-licensed
professional counselors and state-licensed
marriage and family therapists.
ACA encourages counselors to contact their
Senators to ask them why Medicare coverage
of counselors was not included in the health
care bill, and to ask them to cosponsor S.
671—the “Seniors Mental Health Access
Improvement Act”—to show support for
establishing Medicare coverage of
counselors.
ACA also encourages counselors to contact
their Representative to ask that they cosign
the letter being organized by Rep. Bart
Gordon, expressing support for maintaining
the House-passed counselor Medicare coverage
provisions.
To find out who your Senators and
Representative are, visit our
internet action center. For more
information, contact Scott Barstow with ACA
at 800-347-6647 x234, e-mail:
sbarstow@counseling.org.
More talk
about H.R. 3962 on
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