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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答案经过心理疾病倡导者10年的奋斗,心理疾病例如忧郁症等将从2010年1月起与心脏病和癌症等一样得到同等的福利待遇。

解析 本句是一个简单句,但本句翻译首先要确定句子的主语,形式主语是depression,但其后有一个for example,可以推断出真正的主语是省略了的mental diseases。其次,本句主语之前的短语after…作时间状语,短语比较长,所以翻译时可单独成句。最后,在翻译句子的谓语reachequal footing with…时,要推断出equal的前后的比较对象是心理疾病、心脏病和癌症的治疗的福利待遇,而不是这些疾病。
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