Biaggi found eating disorder help, pays it forward

Alessandra Biaggi lives with an eating disorder, and she has since high school.

Biaggi didn’t address it until she started law school at Fordham University, and even then the systemic challenges of finding care and navigating a byzantine insurance system hindered her efforts.

Now as a state senator, Biaggi is ready to change the landscape others who also suffer through such disorders have to navigate to find treatment, through a new bill that not only streamlines the treatment process, but properly defines the disorder in the first place.

“An eating disorder is something you live with every day,” Biaggi said. While at Fordham, she made a list of outpatient eating disorder specialists in the city and began calling. Places were full or didn’t accept insurance. Sometimes, a person would pick up the phone and be downright cold and unkind.

State law currently defines eating disorders as either bulimia — binge eating and purging — or anorexia, an unhealthy obsession with getting skinnier. It’s part of Timothy’s Law, passed in 2006 intended to require insurance companies to cover mental health as much as they cover physical health.

But with the bill Biaggi supported awaiting Gov. Cuomo’s signature, there will be at least a dozen more disorders that could now be covered.

When signed into law, the bill would add issues like pica, rumination disorder, avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and “any other eating disorder” in the most recent version of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual.

“People who were suffering from eating disorders in a complex way … would not be able to get treatment,” Biaggi said. She estimates the out-of-pocket cost of treating uncovered eating disorders could get as high as $30,000 month.

Biaggi is less concerned with the financial complications expanded coverage may bring and more concerned with the impact this legislation will have on those living with eating disorders. Multiple studies found anorexia nervosa is the mental disorder with the highest mortality rate. According to one study out of the University of Leicester, those living with anorexia nervosa had a mortality rate six times higher than the general population.

“Nothing is life and death, but life and death,” Biaggi said. “This bill could be the difference.”