Access to mental-health care should soon be cheaper and easier for millions of Americans, thanks to a "mental-health parity" law

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问题     Access to mental-health care should soon be cheaper and easier for millions of Americans, thanks to a "mental-health parity" law signed by President Bush this month.【F1】After a 10-year battle by mental-health advocates, depression, for example, will reach equal footing with heart disease or cancer on Jan. 1st, 2010.
    【F2】The new law doesn’t cover everyone; most notably, employees of companies with 50 or fewer workers are excluded, as well as people who buy their own policies. But it comes as a great relief to those who will benefit.【F3】Starting in 2010, group health plans will no longer be allowed to impose different limitations on mental-health and substance-abuse coverage than they do for medical treatment. In other words, deductibles, copays, covered hospital days, and any limits on outpatient treatments must be identical. And for the first time, employers who self-insure are required to provide equal coverage, a change that brings parity to 82 million people covered through so-called ERISA plans.
    Since 42 states already have their own form of parity laws and the federal government has required parity from insurers who participate in its benefits plans since 2001, many people won’t notice much of a difference. Under the federal version, insurers can still require that services be medically necessary and can require preapproval or prior review. They can also require medical evidence that the treatments are effective.
    Medicare recipients aren’t affected by this law; a measure adopted earlier this year already eliminated discriminatory copayments in that program, which had been capped at 50 percent for mental-health treatment, compared with 20 percent for most doctors’ services. The Medicare change is being phased in gradually and won’t be fully in force until 2016.
    【F4】Access to care will remain an issue, no matter how good the insurance coverage. Jim Hackett found that out firsthand when he sought psychiatric care for his teenage daughter after she had been sexually assaulted. Hackett is CEO of Anadarko Petroleum in Houston.【F5】Not only did the company’s employees already have mental-health equality, but he could have afforded to pay out of pocket. But the family had to look out of state for an appropriate child psychiatrist. "Now that we have the funding for people to get over the stigma of mental illness, we have to make sure that facilities and doctors will exist for them as well," Hackett says. As a business manager, he believes that the increased cost of parity coverage, which was found to be 0.5 percent of premiums in a 2006 study of federal employee insurance, is more than made up for by increased productivity from employees who are ill themselves or caring for a sick relative.
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答案从2010年开始,集体健康计划就不再被允许在心理疾病和滥用药物的保险范围上施以与医疗待遇不同的限制。

解析 本句是由一个主句加一个比较状语从句构成的复合句,在主句之前还有一个现在分词短语作时间状语,结构相对复杂。翻译时,把starting in 2010仍译成时间短语,而比较难处理的是主句和比较状语之间的关系以及翻译时前后位置的处理。首先,要弄清楚比较的对象是differ-ent limitations on…coverage和different limitations on medical treatment;其次,要弄明白than之后的状语从句中的主语they指的是different limitations。
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