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Advocate tells HHS advisory panel behavioral health must be integrated into value-based care
Summary
At a PTAC public comment session, Florence Fee, executive director of No Health Without Mental Health, urged committee members to remove a decades-old behavioral-health carve-out and require behavioral health integration in population-based total cost-of-care models.
Florence Fee, executive director of No Health Without Mental Health (NHMH), told the Physician-Focused Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC) during the public comment period that the U.S. health system must integrate behavioral health into value-based care models.
“There is a critical need to reform our U.S. health care system to allow for the integration of behavioral health care as an essential foundational component of high quality accountable care relationships,” Fee said. She said the current separation of mental health and medical care into “completely separate independent systems” is a “40‑year‑old outdated anachronistic carve out.”
Fee told the committee the separation of delivery, payment and provider networks harms patients and increases costs. “Fifty percent of the American U.S. adult population has a mental health condition, and half of them get no mental health care at all,” she said, adding that untreated behavioral health conditions drive worse chronic‑disease outcomes and higher total cost of care.
She urged PTAC members to recommend stronger financial incentives and accountability for practices that build behavioral‑health integration into value‑based models, and to adopt stable, consensus quality measures for behavioral health and behavioral‑health integration. Fee also called for patients, caregivers and frontline clinicians to be involved in designing new models and monitoring outcomes.
Petitions and public comments submitted to PTAC are being gathered alongside the committee’s work; the committee is preparing a report to the secretary that will reflect public input. The PTAC public meeting and its posted request for information remain open channels for stakeholders to submit additional material relevant to these topics.
