Minnesota has fined HealthPartners $150,000 for business practices it believes violated mental health parity laws, including paying less to mental health care providers and engaging in more stringent reviews of patient requests for behavioral health care.
The Bloomington-based health insurer neither admitted nor denied the allegations, according to a May 1 consent order with the Minnesota Department of Commerce.
HealthPartners has committed to a corrective action plan, the state said, and the department will monitor the health insurer for compliance for at least one year.
Parity laws prohibit health insurers from making it more difficult for patients to obtain mental health care than services for physical ailments. While the laws have been around for decades in Minnesota and across the country, regulators say they've struggled with enforcement due to the complexity of comparing benefits for mental and physical health care.
"We are committed to ensuring Minnesotans get mental health and substance abuse care when they need it," Commerce Commissioner Grace Arnold said in a statement. "That means holding insurers accountable and targeting obstacles that may make mental health care more difficult to access than other medical care."
HealthPartners said it shared the Commerce Department's goal of mental health parity and had "agreed on a collaborative path forward to address the department's concerns."
"We look forward to continuing our efforts to make meaningful improvements to mental health care and coverage for our members and the community," the health insurer said.
In the consent order, Commerce maintained that HealthPartners violated state law by reimbursing medical/surgical providers at higher rates for certain billing codes — and without sufficient analysis or justification — compared with payments to mental health and substance use disorder providers.