Keep congress out of Mental Health.

• Position: Get Government to Back Off - Brief article

By a unanimous vote, the Senate has approved the Mental Health Parity Act of 2007, which would forbid employers to offer less favorable insurance coverage for mental illness than for physical illness. Support for a similar measure is widespread in the House, so passage of a new Federal law seems likely

"This bill violates an employer's right to set the terms of the benefits he offers," indicates Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, Irvine, Calif. "The bill's supporters point to the obvious fact that mental illness is as real and as destructive as physical illness, but employers have no duty to offer coverage for all ills, or any ills; they have an absolute right to limit or deny coverage on any basis. For example, many employers are reluctant to foot the bill for what they see as open-ended therapies whose great expense is not justified by any certain cure."

In 1996, Congress enacted the first Federal Mental Health Parity Act, which...