Congress passed the Metal Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (the Parity Act) based upon its perception that employers who sponsor group health plans were improperly discriminating against mental health benefit coverage. Congress intended that the Parity Act would cause group health plans to cover treatments for mental health and substance abuse conditions in parity with medical/surgical treatments.

In recent years, we have seen a vast expansion of the number of cases brought by participants in group health plans alleging that their plans (and the plan’s claims administrators) violated the Parity Act by denying claims for mental health coverage. Most of these claims allege violations of a complex provision of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Parity Act regulations known as the Non-Quantitative Treatment Limitations (the NQTL Regulations). The DOL’s goal in promulgating these NQTL Regulations was to ensure that attempts to impose cost controls on mental health benefits rely on the same scientific standards as those that are applied to medical/surgical treatments.