Seventeen percent of Americans are likely to suffer from a majordepressive disorder during their lifetime.

It’s not hard to understand that the wide range of miseryinflicted by widespreaddepression — broken families, unproductiveworkers — has serious implications for society as awhole.

That’s why advocates for years have been pushing for changes ininsurance practices to treat psychological illness as seriously asphysical ailments. They won a number of key victories in recentyears, notably the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of2008 and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, whichrequires most individual health plans to cover a range of mentalhealth issues.

However, a new report suggests that some PPACA marketplace plansare not covering needed antidepressant medications. In asurvey of 35 insurers participating on the exchanges in five states(Alabama, California, Florida, Maryland and Minnesota), the RobertWood Foundation found that most plans excluded less than fiveantidepressants, but that several excluded more than a dozenantidepressant drugs from their formularies.

The PPACA requires all plans to cover the same number of drugsas are covered by the “benchmark” plan in their state, which isoften simply the most enrolled small group health plan in thestate. The law does not include the “protected classes” provisionof Medicare, which requires plans to cover every drug in sixdesignated medication classes, including antidepressants.

Perhaps the bigger issue the report revealed is how hard it isto find out whether a given plan covers a certain medication. Of thefive state exchanges, only Florida and Alabama, which are run bythe federal government, have links to the plan formularies that canbe accessed by anonymously browsing for plans. However, even inthose instances, the link often redirects a person to the home pageof the insurance company’s website, which makes it hard to trackdown the needed information.

Furthermore, many plans do not include specific information onthe variety of limits imposed on antidepressant coverage. Mostrequire prior authorization, but some impose “quantity limits,”whose specifics are often not described on the plan formularies,the report found.

The report urges for more transparency on the exchange websites,as well as laws curtailing quantity limits and prior authorizationrequirements.