Effect of State Parity Laws on Children with Mental Health Care Needs

What is the impact of state mental health parity laws on children? While they acknowledge that prior studies have evaluated these laws, they indicate that their study would differ due to its focus on children (rather than adults). In addition, they state prior multi-state studies looked at utilization and access and did not evaluate the impact of state parity laws on the economic burden of seeking mental health treatment. They propose to examine how state parity laws affect out-of-pocket health care spending and other measures of the financial burden of treatment costs on families. The objective of this study is to inform the debate about the impact of mental health parity laws at both the state and federal levels.