BH710 Unit 2 Assignment Guide: Mental Health Parity, MHPAEA, and Professional Ethics

This is the first 100-point assignment in Herzing BH710, and it lands in Unit 2, before you have had much time to settle into the course. It is also a video presentation, not a paper, which changes how you should plan for it: recording, narration pacing, and slide design all eat time that a written assignment does not require.

This guide breaks the assignment down exactly as Herzing’s rubric grades it, then walks through a slide-by-slide plan for building it. At the end, you will find a worked example section showing what strong content looks like for a few representative slides, so you can see the depth the rubric is asking for before you build your own full deck.

Unit 2 Assignment: Mental Health Parity, MHPAEA, and Professional Ethics

Assignment Instructions

For this assignment, you will review the Mental Health Parity Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) and develop a professional PowerPoint presentation that demonstrates your understanding of these laws and their implications for behavioral healthcare practice. 

In your presentation, explain how you would apply your discipline’s Code of Ethics when working with individuals whose access to mental health or substance use disorder services may be affected by these laws. Identify the specific ethical principles or standards from your profession’s Code of Ethics (e.g., social work, counseling, psychology, nursing) that guide your clinical decision-making, advocacy, and ethical responsibilities.

Your presentation should also:

• Describe the purpose and key provisions of the Mental Health Parity Act and the MHPAEA.
• Identify the specific type(s) of insurance you are referencing (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, commercial/private insurance, employer-sponsored plans).
• Discuss how parity laws influence access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment under the selected insurance plan(s).
• Analyze potential ethical challenges that may arise when assisting patients with insurance-related barriers to care.
• Explain how you would advocate for equitable access to behavioral healthcare while maintaining ethical and professional standards.

Presentation Requirements: 

• A minimum of 10 content slides (not including the title and reference slides).

• Use APA (7th edition) formatting for citations and references.

• Include a reference slide with scholarly and credible sources.

Record and submit a narrated video presentation that is at least 15 minutes in length, demonstrating a thorough analysis of the topic and effective integration of course concepts.

Unit 2 Assignment Example

BH710_Unit2_Parity_MHPAEA_Example Click to Download

What This Assignment Actually Requires

Based on the official assignment instructions, you are building a narrated PowerPoint presentation, not a written paper. The core deliverable:

• A minimum of 10 content slides, not counting the title slide or reference slide.
• A narrated video recording of the presentation, at least 15 minutes long.
• APA 7th edition formatting for all in-text citations and the reference slide.
• Scholarly, credible sources on the reference slide.

Content-wise, the assignment asks you to do five things:

1. Describe the purpose and key provisions of the Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA) and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA).
2. Identify the specific type or types of insurance you are focusing on (Medicare, Medicaid, commercial/private insurance, or employer-sponsored plans).
3. Discuss how parity laws influence access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment under the insurance plan(s) you selected.
4. Analyze the ethical challenges that can arise when helping patients navigate insurance-related barriers to care.
5. Explain how you, working within your discipline’s Code of Ethics, would advocate for equitable behavioral healthcare access while staying within professional and ethical standards.

That last point is the one students most often underdeliver on. The assignment does not just want you to summarize MHPAEA. It wants you to name your discipline (social work, counseling, psychology, or nursing), cite the specific Code of Ethics your discipline follows, and connect specific principles from that code to the access and advocacy scenario you are analyzing.

How This Assignment Is Graded

Herzing grades this assignment across five rubric categories, each worth 20 points, for a 100-point total. Here is what “Exemplary,” the top rating, actually requires in each category:

Two things worth noticing before you start building slides. First, Content and Ethical Application and Advocacy are each worth as much as the entire APA category, so a technically clean deck with thin ethics analysis will not score as well as a slightly rougher deck with strong ethical reasoning. Second, “10 content slides” and “15 minutes” are floors, not targets. The rubric explicitly penalizes decks that land right at the minimum with narration “marginally under 15 minutes,” so build in a small buffer on both.

Step 1: Choose Your Discipline’s Code of Ethics

The assignment asks you to work from your own discipline’s Code of Ethics, not a generic behavioral health ethics framework. Confirm which one applies to you (or the discipline your BH710 program track represents) before you write anything:

A note on currency: the ACA has signaled a revised Code of Ethics is expected in late 2026, and the ANA’s Code is due for its next scheduled revision as well. Check each organization’s website before you finalize your reference slide, since the 2014 and 2015 editions listed above are the current, enforceable versions as of this course guide, but that can change.

Once you know your code, pull two or three specific, named principles or standards, not the code’s general values statement, that map directly onto insurance-related access barriers and advocacy. For social work, that might be the NASW principle on social justice and the standard on client access to services. For nursing, Provision 3 (protecting patient rights) and Provision 8 (collaborating to protect human rights and reduce health disparities) both connect naturally to parity and access. The more specific the citation, the stronger your Ethical Application and Advocacy score.

Step 2: Understand MHPA and MHPAEA Well Enough to Teach Them

You need to be able to explain, in your own words and on camera, what these two laws actually do:

The Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA), 1996. The original federal parity law. It prohibited group health plans from setting lower annual or lifetime dollar limits on mental health benefits than on medical and surgical benefits. It did not require plans to cover mental health at all, and it did not address substance use disorder benefits or treatment limitations like visit caps.

The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA), 2008. Closed the major gaps in MHPA. MHPAEA requires that when a group health plan or insurer covers mental health or substance use disorder benefits, the financial requirements (copays, coinsurance) and treatment limitations (visit limits, prior authorization, network requirements) applied to those benefits be no more restrictive than what applies to medical and surgical benefits. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 added a requirement that plans document and be able to produce comparative analyses of their nonquantitative treatment limitations (NQTLs), the harder-to-measure barriers like prior authorization and network adequacy standards, on request.

For the Content section of the rubric, this distinction (MHPA set dollar-limit parity; MHPAEA extended parity to treatment limitations and added substance use disorder coverage) is exactly the kind of specific, accurate detail that separates a Proficient score from an Exemplary one. A vague statement like “MHPAEA requires equal coverage for mental health” will read as underdeveloped.

One current-events note worth building into your Analysis and Comparison section: federal enforcement of the 2024 MHPAEA final rule (which would have added stricter NQTL documentation requirements) has been paused since May 2025 pending litigation, though the underlying 2008 MHPAEA statute and the 2013 implementing regulations remain fully enforceable. That distinction, between what is legally required and what is currently being enforced at the federal level, is worth a sentence in your presentation if you want to demonstrate that your analysis reflects the current regulatory environment rather than an outdated snapshot.

Step 3: Choose Your Insurance Type (or Types)

Pick one or two insurance categories to anchor your analysis rather than trying to cover all four. Each behaves differently under parity law:

• Commercial and employer-sponsored insurance. This is where MHPAEA has its most direct and complete application, since the law was written primarily for group health plans and issuers.
• Medicaid. Managed care plans and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) plans are subject to MHPAEA-aligned parity requirements; fee-for-service Medicaid has a more complicated regulatory history.
• Medicare. Historically outside MHPAEA’s direct scope, since Medicare predates the law and is regulated separately, which creates a real and citable access gap worth analyzing.
• Employer-sponsored self-funded plans. Covered by MHPAEA as group health plans, but enforcement here runs primarily through the Department of Labor rather than state insurance regulators.

Choosing Medicare specifically, and explaining why it sits outside MHPAEA’s core coverage, is a strong way to generate the “systemic implications” the Analysis and Comparison rubric row is looking for, since it lets you discuss a real, current access gap rather than restating that parity exists.

Step 4: Build Your Slide Outline

Here is a 12-slide structure that clears the 10-content-slide minimum with room to spare, and maps cleanly onto every rubric category:

1. Title slide (not counted toward the 10)
2. Agenda and learning objectives for the presentation
3. Overview of the Mental Health Parity Act (1996): purpose and key provisions
4. Overview of MHPAEA (2008): what it added, including NQTL comparative analysis requirements
5. Your selected insurance type(s) and why they matter to this analysis
6. How parity law applies (or does not fully apply) to your selected insurance type
7. Access impacts: coverage, eligibility, and treatment-limitation differences under your selected plan(s)
8. Population-specific impacts: youth versus adult access differences, plus at least one other population (rural, marginalized, or dually eligible)
9. Concrete example of an access barrier a patient could realistically face
10. Your discipline’s Code of Ethics: the specific principles that apply to insurance-related access barriers
11. Ethical challenges you may encounter when helping patients navigate these barriers
12. Advocacy strategies: what you would actually do, within your professional and ethical standards
13. Conclusion and key takeaways
14. Reference slide (not counted toward the 10)

That is 12 content slides against a 10-slide floor, which gives you room if a slide runs short during recording.

For the narration, plan on roughly 75 to 90 seconds of spoken content per content slide to comfortably clear 15 minutes without padding. Write your narration script first, at the sentence level, before you record. A script that reads naturally at a normal speaking pace is easier to hit the time requirement with than trying to stretch ad-libbed narration on the fly.

Step 5: Get the APA 7 Details Right

The APA rubric row is worth as much as Content, and it is the category students lose the most avoidable points on:

• Cite sources with in-text citations on the slides where you use them, not only on the reference slide. A statistic or provision summary without an in-text citation is an APA gap even if the source appears in your references.
• Use a properly formatted APA 7 reference slide: hanging indent, alphabetical order, full DOI or URL where applicable.
• Government sources (DOL, CMS, HHS) and professional-organization sources (NASW, ACA, APA, ANA) format differently in APA 7 than journal articles. Confirm the correct format for each source type rather than using one template for all of them.
• Narrate your citations naturally when you reference them out loud (for example, “according to the Department of Labor’s 2025 enforcement statement”) rather than only displaying them on the slide.

Example: What Strong Content Looks Like

BH710_Unit2_Parity_MHPAEA_Example Click to Download

The following is an illustrative model, not a script to copy. It shows the depth and specificity the rubric rewards for three representative slides, using a fictitious client to demonstrate the ethical application section. Building your own presentation around your own selected insurance type, discipline, and sources is what earns the grade.

Sample Slide 6, MHPAEA and Medicare: Where Parity Protection Gets Thin

Slide bullets:

• Medicare was enacted before MHPAEA and is regulated under a separate statutory framework
• Traditional Medicare’s mental health outpatient coverage historically imposed different cost-sharing than medical/surgical outpatient care, a gap that has narrowed but not fully closed
• Medicare Advantage plans have more MHPAEA-adjacent obligations, but enforcement runs through CMS rather than DOL, creating inconsistent oversight compared to commercial plans

Model narration excerpt: “Medicare occupies an unusual position in the parity landscape. Because it predates MHPAEA and operates under its own statutory authority, beneficiaries do not have the same direct parity protections that commercial plan members have. For a behavioral health provider working with an older adult on traditional Medicare, that means the coverage gap is not hypothetical. It is a documented structural feature of the program that shapes what treatment options are realistically available.”

Sample Slide 10, Applying the NASW Code of Ethics to Insurance Barriers

Slide bullets:

• NASW Code of Ethics, Ethical Principle: Social Workers Challenge Social Injustice, applied directly to insurance-driven access barriers
• NASW Standard 1.01, Commitment to Clients, requires advocacy when a plan’s coverage limits conflict with a client’s documented treatment need
• Ethical tension: advocating for a client’s coverage appeal can conflict with time and caseload constraints in a fee-for-service or managed-care setting

Model narration excerpt: “Consider a fictitious client, Maria R., a 34-year-old on an employer-sponsored plan whose substance use disorder treatment was denied after eight sessions, while a comparable number of physical therapy sessions for a medical condition would not have triggered the same review. Under the NASW Code of Ethics, the principle that social workers challenge social injustice does not stay abstract here. It translates into a specific action: filing a parity-based appeal on Maria’s behalf and documenting the disparity in treatment limitations as potential MHPAEA noncompliance.”

Sample Slide 12, Advocacy Strategy Within Professional Standards

Slide bullets:

• Document the specific NQTL applied (session cap, prior authorization requirement) and compare it to the parallel medical/surgical benefit
• File a formal parity complaint or appeal through the plan’s internal process, then the state insurance department or DOL if unresolved
• Maintain professional boundaries: advocate for the client’s access, not around your scope of practice or agency policy

Model narration excerpt: “Effective advocacy here is specific, not generic. Rather than telling a client to appeal a denial, an ethical response documents exactly which treatment limitation was applied, compares it to how the plan treats an equivalent medical benefit, and uses that comparison as the basis for a formal parity complaint. That approach keeps the advocacy grounded in the client’s actual clinical need while staying inside professional and ethical boundaries.”

Notice what these three slides are doing: naming a specific law provision or ethics standard, connecting it to a concrete (in this case fictitious) scenario, and stating a specific action rather than a general one. That pattern, specific citation, concrete example, specific action, is what the rubric’s “Exemplary” language is describing across every category.

Common Mistakes That Cost Points on This Assignment

• Treating MHPA and MHPAEA as interchangeable. They are two different laws with two different scopes. Confusing them signals underdeveloped Content.
• Naming a Code of Ethics without citing specific principles. “I would follow my Code of Ethics” is not an application of it. Name the standard or provision number.
• Choosing an insurance type but never returning to it. If you identify commercial insurance in slide 5, your access and ethics analysis in later slides needs to keep referencing that same plan type, not drift into generic statements.
• Landing exactly at 10 slides and 15 minutes. The rubric explicitly flags submissions that are “marginally under 15 minutes” or have slides that “may equal 10” as Competent rather than Exemplary. Build margin in.
• Citing sources only on the reference slide. In-text citations on the content slides themselves are part of the APA rubric row, not just the reference list.

Research and Sources for This Assignment

Prioritize primary sources over blog summaries:

• U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) for MHPAEA enforcement guidance, fact sheets, and the annual Report to Congress.
• CMS.gov for Medicaid and Medicare-specific parity and behavioral health coverage information.
• Your discipline’s professional organization (NASW, ACA, APA, ANA) for the current Code of Ethics text itself, cited directly rather than through a secondary summary.
• Peer-reviewed health policy journals (Health Affairs, Psychiatric Services, Journal of Behavioral Health Services & Research) for analysis of parity implementation and access outcomes.

Because MHPAEA enforcement status has shifted more than once since 2024, verify the current enforcement posture directly on DOL’s EBSA site before recording, so your presentation reflects the current regulatory reality rather than an outdated one.

For the broader course context this assignment sits inside, see the BH710 Policy and Value-Based Care in Behavioral Health course guide, which covers how this assignment connects to the rest of the term.

Get Help With This Assignment

If you are building this presentation after a full workday, the parts that eat the most time are usually the ones this guide just walked through: picking the right insurance angle, finding the specific Code of Ethics standards, and pacing a script to hit 15 minutes without padding.

Need help structuring your BH710 parity presentation? Gradevia can help you plan your slide outline, identify the right sources, and organize your analysis around the rubric before you start recording. Message WhatsApp at +1 564-544-6924.

Already have a draft deck or script? Gradevia can review it for APA formatting, rubric alignment, and pacing before you record your narration. Message WhatsApp at +1 564-544-6924.

Gradevia is an independent academic support service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Herzing University. Gradevia does not guarantee any particular grade.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does the BH710 Mental Health Parity presentation need to be? At least 15 minutes of narrated video, with a minimum of 10 content slides not counting the title and reference slides.

What is the difference between MHPA and MHPAEA? The 1996 Mental Health Parity Act addressed dollar-limit parity only. The 2008 MHPAEA extended parity to treatment limitations, added substance use disorder coverage, and, as amended by the 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act, added NQTL comparative-analysis documentation requirements.

Which Code of Ethics should I use for this assignment? Whichever one matches your discipline: the NASW Code of Ethics for social work, the ACA Code of Ethics for counseling, the APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists for psychology, or the ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses for nursing. Cite the current edition and name specific principles or standards rather than referencing the code generally.

Do I need to cover more than one type of insurance? No. The assignment asks you to identify the specific type(s) you are referencing, and a focused analysis of one or two plan types (for example, commercial insurance and Medicare) generally supports deeper analysis than trying to cover all four.

How many points is this assignment worth? 100 points, scored across five rubric categories of 20 points each: Content, Analysis and Comparison, Ethical Application and Advocacy, Writing and Presentation Quality, and APA.

What is the biggest way students lose points on this assignment? Thin ethical application (naming a Code of Ethics without citing specific standards) and landing right at the 10-slide or 15-minute minimums instead of building in margin.

Conclusion

This assignment rewards specificity: a named law provision, a named ethics standard, a named insurance type, and a named advocacy action, all connected to each other rather than presented as separate sections. Build your slide outline around the rubric’s five categories, script your narration before you record, and confirm your Code of Ethics citations are current before you finalize your reference slide.

For help planning, researching, or reviewing your BH710 parity presentation, message Gradevia on WhatsApp at +1 564-544-6924, or browse the full BH710 course hub for guides to the rest of the term’s assignments.

References

American Counseling Association. (2014). ACA code of ethics. https://www.counseling.org/resources/aca-code-of-ethics.pdf

American Nurses Association. (2015). Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements. https://www.nursingworld.org/coe-view-only

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (2002, amended effective June 1, 2010, and January 1, 2017). https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

National Association of Social Workers. (2021). Code of ethics of the National Association of Social Workers. https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics

U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, & U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2025). Statement regarding enforcement of the final rule on requirements related to the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. Employee Benefits Security Administration. https://www.cms.gov/files/document/statement-regarding-enforcement-final-rule-requirements-related-mhpaea.pdf

U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration. (2024). 2023 report to Congress: MHPAEA comparative analysis. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/laws-and-regulations/laws/mental-health-parity/report-to-congress-2023-mhpaea-comparative-analysis

Note for readers: Codes of ethics and MHPAEA enforcement guidance are periodically revised. Confirm you are citing the current edition of your discipline’s Code of Ethics and the current MHPAEA enforcement status directly from the publishing organization before submitting, and verify all detailed rubric requirements against the current BH710 assignment instructions in the Herzing course environment.