Mental Health Awareness Month is an opportunity to recognize Medicaid’s essential role in helping people access mental health care and treatment for substance use disorder. As the nation’s largest payer for mental health and substance use disorder care, Medicaid covers approximately twenty two million non-elderly Americans with these conditions who rely on the program’s essential services including therapy, crisis care, medications and opioid use disorder treatment.
Medicaid helps people stay connected to the treatment and supports that allow them to remain in their communities. Medicaid provides:
- Better access to treatment: Research shows that Medicaid expansion helps more people access mental health services, substance use disorder care and necessary medications.
- Improved continuity of care: In states that have expanded Medicaid, people are less likely to skip medications due to cost and more likely to seek regular care for their ongoing health conditions.
- Stronger rural safety nets: Medicaid provides mental health and substance use coverage for individuals in communities with limited treatment options and helps sustain the providers that make recovery possible.
Medicaid’s impact on mental health and substance use disorder care is clear. Here’s how it touches the lives of patients across the country:
- In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, Toni used Medicaid to access medication-assisted treatment, which she described as central to her recovery from drug addiction. Without Medicaid, she said she likely would not have been able to receive that treatment.
- MMA partner National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) collects advocate stories that highlight similar support from Medicaid:
- Therapy services provided through Medicaid helped Trinh, from Nevada, treat her depression and access health care in settings other than the emergency room. “I was able to turn to Medicaid to get the help… that I desperately needed.”
- Gina in Illinois said Medicaid covers her son’s physical and psychological care, including expensive medication for schizoaffective disorder. “Without it, he would not be with us today,” she explained.
Upcoming Medicaid work reporting requirements and more frequent eligibility checks could put health care access at risk for people with mental health or substance use conditions. These conditions can vary widely in severity, duration and impact, and narrow interpretations of how patients are impacted by them could leave people who need care at risk of losing coverage.
Mental Health Awareness Month shines a light on the importance of safeguarding Medicaid’s ability to deliver essential mental health and substance use disorder services. Policymakers must prioritize solutions that reduce coverage disruptions and barriers to care, including by ensuring state flexibility in defining exemptions and establishing verification processes, to help protect millions of Americans’ access to the support and services they need to lead healthy, stable lives.