The Obama administration says it will try to accentuate the positive when it goes about implementing the new Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act regulations.

Officials at three agencies – the U.S. Treasury's Internal Revenue Service; the U.S. Labor Department's Employee Benefits Security Administration; and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight – talk about how they will persuade employers to follow the parity rules in a batch of answers to questions about implementation.

MHPAEA does not directly require any health plan to offer mental health or addiction treatment benefits, but it does require the rules for any behavioral health benefits offered be similar to the rules for about two-thirds of the medical benefits offered.

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Allison Bell

Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.