TPC Journal-Vol 9- Issue 4-FULL ISSUE

320 The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 4 The inefficiency of current Medicare policy was highlighted when several participants alluded to inconsistencies between insurance programs, including certain cases in which having Medicare precluded clients from using other forms of insurance (e.g., Medicaid, Tricare, private supplemental plans) that would otherwise cover mental health treatment by LPCs. This feature of the MMHCG has important ramifications given that 81% of Medicare beneficiaries possess a supplemental health plan (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2019), including more than 12 million Americans who are dually covered by Medicare and Medicaid (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, n.d.). For this latter group, dual-eligible adults are more likely to have functional or cognitive impairments, chronic conditions, or conditions that frequently coincide with mental health conditions. In fact, among dual-eligible individuals, 59% of those with disabilities and 20% of those who are 65 years or older self-reported diagnosis of a mental health disorder (Donohue, 2006). This means that some of the most vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries are particularly burdened by current Medicare mental health policy. Implications for Professional Advocacy Regarding advocacy on behalf of clients, these findings suggest that Medicare reimbursement for LPCs is urgently needed in order to provide Medicare-insured populations with access to mental health services. Currently, efforts to change Medicare regulations through the legislative process have support from a broad range of professional interest groups, many of which comprise the Medicare Mental Health Workforce Coalition (Medicare Mental Health Workforce Coalition, 2019). Further, there is currently legislation under consideration in both the U.S. Senate (S. 286; Mental Health Access Improvement Act, 2019) and U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 945; Mental Health Access Improvement Act, 2019) that would include LPCs and LMFTs as Medicare-eligible providers. As of November 2019, these bills had 29 and 96 cosponsors, respectively (U.S. Congress 2019a, 2019b). Despite these efforts, more than half of counseling professionals recently surveyed had not participated in advocacy related to Medicare reimbursement (Fullen, Lawson, & Sharma, in press-b). Therefore, additional work is needed to educate members of the counseling profession about the consequences of current Medicare mental health policy on clients from underserved populations. Fullen et al. (in press-a, in press-b) describe several strategies that can be used to strengthen advocacy efforts among members of the counseling profession, including counselor educators, master’s and doctoral students, and practicing counselors. Limitations and Future Research A primary limitation of this study relates to the generalizability of the results. This study reports on a specific and localized account of how Medicare mental health policy impacts Medicare beneficiaries’ access to counseling treatment in a single state. We intentionally focused on a homogenous sample purposefully selected to explore how LPCs are making sense of their inability to provide counseling services to Medicare beneficiaries based on their professional status as Medicare-ineligible. The findings present a narrative account of how these licensed mental health providers make sense of and respond to the experience of not being able to serve Medicare clients because of professional limitations contained within Medicare mental health policy. The utilization of IPA has allowed for the detection of nuance, subtlety, and complexity within the data from the semi-structured interviews with our participants. This specificity allows for an understanding that shows how the coverage gap created by the exclusion of counselors impacts Medicare beneficiaries’ access to counseling services. An additional limitation of our study is the use of prolonged engagement as a strategy to establish credibility and trustworthiness. Prolonged engagement, traditionally employed in ethnography and participant observation, requires that researchers spend sufficient time in the field to learn or