New rules to raise health care premiums

Business Insurance reports on the Obama administration's latest effort to raise health care costs for most Americans:

Mental health and substance abuse treatment also must be equivalent to that provided for medical and surgical care within benefit classifications and coverage tiers, such as in- and out-of-network care, emergency care and prescription drugs, according to the rules, which implement the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. That 2008 law requires group health care plans offered by employers with more than 50 employees to provide the same coverage for mental health care services as for other medical, surgical and substance abuse services.

Such rules may sound well-meaning and there are people who need mental health services. The problem, however, is that requiring insurance to pay for treatment of conditions that cannot be medically verified ("Doctor, I feel bad") opens the system up to abuse and never-ending cost increases.

The departments of HHS, Labor, and Treasury, are developing these regulations based on a bill passed in 2008. That means the bill was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress and then signed by Pres. Bush.

Megan McArdle has more on this here and here.

PREVIOUSLY on Obama's plans for medical care:
•Those who want to go done with the ship: Obamacare Dead-enders
•Obamacare may raise insurance costs by 54%
•Harvard's Dean of Medicine opposes Obamacare
•Rahm Emanuel explains that they are not even trying have Obamacare make sense
•Harvard economist explains why Obamacare will raise premiums
•HHS says Obamacare will cause costs to go up and cause employers to drop coverage
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in
•Polls say majority of voters oppose Obamacare
•Obama wants to kill your mother!
•The Canadian health care collapse