Georgia’s 2022 Mental Health Parity Act needs more understanding and awareness to be effective, a state official and mental health leaders said Tuesday.
While speaking at the Carter Center’s 2025 Rosalynn Carter Georgia Mental Health Forum, Georgia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities Commissioner Kevin Tanner said problems persist because most people don’t know when their rights have been violated and the system is too complicated to navigate.
“We’ve got to create a platform where those violations are getting reported so that we can … start changing the behavior of the insurance companies,” Tanner said. “Until we’re able to do that, we’re not going to be able to truly reform the mental health system in this state.”
Three years ago, state legislators passed a 76-page parity bill requiring insurance companies to cover mental health care and substance abuse at levels comparable to physical health care, something already required at the federal level. That means patients should have access to the same copays, deductibles and numbers of sessions for anxiety, depression or addiction as for illnesses of the rest of the body.
For those on Medicaid, the state health benefit plan or PeachCare for Kids, enforcement of parity compliance is overseen by the state Department of Community Health. The state Department of Insurance supervises private insurers.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
But since the law went into effect, there have been fewer than a dozen complaints reported to each agency, said Laura Colbert, the executive director of Georgians for a Healthy Future. And Sarah Phillips of the Carter Center said some of those complaints are duplicates or don’t relate to mental health.
“The law is still very much in its infancy when it comes to implementation,” Phillips said.
Patients can complain if they have been denied coverage for mental health care or treatment for substance use disorder and have their case reviewed. But Dr. John Constantino, the behavioral and mental health chief at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, said the larger issue is the availability of mental health specialists.
Insurance companies are supposed to maintain a sufficient network of health care providers for medical and mental health conditions so members can get care in a reasonable amount of time from in-network providers.
But if there isn’t a provider available, that patient may not get treated for their condition at all and the insurance company may not know their member is “floating around without any care,” Constantino said. “It’s invisible.”
Mental health patients are 15 times more likely to go outside their insurance pool for treatment, Constantino said. When that happens, patients have to pay for care out of their own pockets.
When patients know that they have the right to coverage and receive information about how to appeal decisions, they have success in getting mental health care, Colbert said.
The situation is slowly improving in Georgia. Two years ago, Georgia ranked 49th in access to care, according to Mental Health America’s 2023 report. In the 2024 report, the state was 47th.
“We have a foundation that has been laid,” Tanner said. “Now it’s going to be on all of us working together to make sure that it’s implemented.”
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