King vetoes increase in mental health aid

AUGUSTA – Advocate agencies and support groups for the mentally ill will stage a noon rally today in Portland to deplore Gov. Angus King’s veto of a bill extending insurance coverage to workers requiring mental health benefits.

Late Tuesday afternoon, King vetoed LD 1627 “An Act to Ensure Equality in Mental Health Coverage” while emphasizing that the state is facing a health insurance crisis.

“Accordingly, it is a particularly bad time to add costs, regardless of how big or small,” King said in his veto message to the Legislature. “As we face expected double-digit increases in health insurance costs for at least several more years, we cannot ask people who can barely afford what they have now to pay more. While expanding mental health care is a worthy goal, we cannot allow the best [comprehensive coverage including full mental health benefits] to become the enemy of the good [any coverage at all].

In 1995, King signed a progressive mental health parity law that required health insurance coverage for seven specific biologically based mental illnesses in policies held by employer groups of 20 or more. He said the bill proposed by the current Legislature goes “considerably beyond” the 1995 act to expand mandated coverage to 11 categories of mental illness as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, increasing the number of potentially covered disorders to more than 40.

Those new categories included licensed clinical professional counselors in the definition of providers eligible to treat mental illness and receive reimbursement for those services; and to require coverage for residential treatment services and home support services. King said the addition of anxiety disorders, personality disorders, attention deficit-disruptive behavior disorders and the substance abuse aspects of those illnesses already covered under the 1995 law inevitably will increase health insurance costs.

The governor’s veto will do little to lighten the load of many poor Maine families, some of whom find it necessary to surrender custody of their children to the state to ensure that their sons and daughters can get the treatment they need. While the governor apparently empathized with the plight of poor Mainers, he said he had to put the needs of the business community first.

“While the bill before me is well-intentioned, it is offered in a period of dramatically escalating health care and insurance costs,” he wrote. “As we look for ways to reduce the costs of health care, we must not exacerbate the problem by adding new mandates. When you are in a hole, the first rule is not to dig any deeper. This bill would serve to make the hole deeper, because the addition of another mandated benefit virtually guarantees that the cost of health insurance for employer groups of 20 or more will increase.”

For Rep. Benjamin Dudley, D-Portland, the governor’s veto was not a huge surprise. A sponsor of LD 1627, Dudley said King had been sending signals indicating his opposition to the bill for most of the current legislative session.

“We knew it was going to be an uphill fight,” he said. “But we were encouraged by the 89 votes in support we got in the House and 20 votes in the Senate. I think an override of the veto is unlikely. But in a lot of respects, it’s still a victory because no one, including some of our strongest supporters, expected to get this passed in the House and Senate.”

The Legislature will reconvene on April 24 to sustain or override the governor’s veto on LD 1627. The rally encouraging legislators to override the veto will be held at noon in Portland at the Amistad Social Club at 66 State St.