Legislative Alert
It's finally starting: major health care reform legislation has been released
by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and
other committees are beginning to put forward their own proposals.
Congress is working to pass health care reform legislation-including provisions
to protect and improve the Medicare program-by August, so that lawmakers can
meld them into a single legislative proposal to approve and send to the
President in October. Over the next two to three weeks, decisions will be
made within the Senate Finance Committee and within House committees
which may determine whether or not counselors gain recognition under Medicare,
the nation's largest health insurance program.
Congress is under tremendous pressure to keep the cost of the overall
legislation to a minimum, and even though covering counselors would cost
less than $200 million over five years (a drop in the bucket in the context
of Medicare spending), Senators and Representatives won't be willing to
spend even this amount of money if they don't know constituents want them
to.
ACTION NEEDED
Please take a moment over the next few days to contact your Senators and
Representative to ask them to cosponsor legislation to establish Medicare
coverage of counselors-H.R. 1693 / S. 671, the "Seniors Mental Health Access
Improvement Act"-and to work to make sure that counselor coverage is
included in any Medicare legislation adopted this year. Licensed
professional counselors have been recognized as full-fledged mental health
professionals within private-sector health plans for years, and Medicare's
benefit package should be brought up-to-date by doing so, as well. Studies
show that Medicare beneficiaries need better access to outpatient mental
health services.
For a List of Indiana Legislators Click Here.
YOUR CONTACTS MATTER! If you don't believe this, please take a moment to
look at the graph on the main section of the ACA website
(http://www.counseling.org/publicpolicy) which shows how Congressional staff
rate the effectiveness of different types of contacts. A single, sincere,
self-written e-mail to a member of Congress has more impact than an
in-person visit from an ACA lobbyist!
If you wish to e-mail your representative go to this link,
http://capwiz.com/counseling/home/
It will take you to the ACA page where you can then directly send a message to
senators and representatives based on your zip code.
|