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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答案无论保险涵盖面多广泛,如何切实地获得医疗福利仍然是一个问题。

解析 这个句子句式看似简单,由一个no matter how引导的让步状语从句和一个主句构成。翻译时,汉语的状语多放在主句之前,故状语从句翻译时要放在主句之前;其次,是单词good词义的确定,汉语是“好的”意思,但这里明显不能翻译成“好的”,译成“宽的”比较合适;最后,是短语access to care的翻译,需要根据上下文语境意译,care指的是医疗福利,access to主要是表示如何获得的意思。
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