Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
October 03, 2008 at 06:27 AM
President Bush today signed a bailout bill that includes mental health parity legislation.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives earlier voted 263-171 to pass the bill.
Technically, lawmakers were voting to approve amendments that the Senate made to H.R. 1424.
Before the bill came up for a vote, lawmakers voted 223-205 in favor of H. Res. 1525, a resolution that permitted H.R. 1424, Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, to come up on the House floor.
Senate leaders created the version of the bill that passed in the House today by putting the text of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which includes the Troubled Asset Relief Program provisions, into a bill that originally was introduced as the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.
The TARP section of H.R. 1424 would let the Treasury secretary use the repurchase program to shore up retirement plans but would exclude Section 409A non-qualified deferred compensation plans from the list of the types of retirement plans that ought to be helped.
H.R. 1424 includes a collection of “tax extenders,” or provisions that would extend certain tax breaks, such as alternative minimum tax relief; a break for taxpayers who contribute individual retirement account assets to charity, and a provision for the “extension and modification of duty suspension on wool products.”
The tax extenders and the mental health parity section are in H.R. 1424 because they already were in the bill when the Senate used it as the vehicle for considering the EESA legislation.
