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To the Editor: In their study of insurance parity and the use of follow-up mental health care, Dr Trivedi and colleagues¹ reported that enrollees in Medicare plans that had greater cost sharing for mental health services than for other services were less likely to receive timely outpatient care following a psychiatric hospitalization. The authors reported that the interaction of race and parity was not statistically significant. However, it seems difficult to assess whether race played a role in receiving follow-up care because (1) the inclusion criteria may have excluded many individuals who could appropriately have been in the study and (2) the identification of race was limited to the categories of white, black, and other.

The inclusion criterion of at least 2 years' participation in Medicare may have been too stringent considering that the time frames for the outcome measures were 7 and 30 days. A more reasonable criterion could . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Brason Lee, MSW, MS
brasonlee@gmail.com
California Department of Public Health
Sacramento

Glen L. Xiong, MD
Department of Psychiatry
University of California, Davis

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RELATED ARTICLE

Insurance Parity and the Use of Outpatient Mental Health Care Following a Psychiatric Hospitalization
Amal N. Trivedi, Shailender Swaminathan, and Vincent Mor
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Insurance Parity and Outpatient Care Following a Psychiatric Hospitalization—Reply
Amal N. Trivedi, Shailender Swaminathan, and Vincent Mor
JAMA. 2009;301(18):1881.
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