In 2017, the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network (CPEHN) sponsored Assembly Bill (AB) 470, known as the Mental Health Equity Act, because we recognized disparities in mental health care but lacked the data to address them. Now, seven years after AB 470 was passed, we have seen important progress in data collection to unveil gaps in access and equity.
A few years ago, the AB 470 dataset was updated to include data from 2021 and 2022, along with county-level data for each managed care plan (MCP) and county mental health plan (MHP). The inclusion of this 2021 and 2022 data provides an important snapshot of access to Medi-Cal’s behavioral health services immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that exacerbated disparities and the need for mental health support, but before full implementation of many of the more recent health system delivery changes under the California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal (CalAIM) initiative and other significant behavioral health policies. This report can then serve as a baseline from which to measure the extent to which Cal-AIM policies and interventions have resulted in significant improvements in health outcomes.