By law, mental health benefits are supposed to be as good as medical coverage. In practice, that’s not happening.

By: Jennifer Brown

March 27, 2019

Like most dads, John Cooke would have done anything to save his daughter.

He was lucky he had the money. To make her well, to make his teenager want to live and stop planning her suicide, Cooke and his wife would end up paying $150,000.

With each denial from the family’s insurance company, the Cookes wrote another check. When the company deemed it no longer “medically necessary” for their teenager to stay in a residential treatment center in Wisconsin, or another center in Utah, the Cookes paid out of pocket until the doctors said she was well enough to come home.

Full version originally appeared on The Colorado Sun.