PROVIDENCE — If Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy doesn’t stick to his addiction treatment plan, people would view it as a personal failing, the congressman said yesterday. He said they would judge him more harshly than they would a cardiac patient who stopped taking hypertension medication, even though both examples involve diseases that require medical treatment.

Kennedy is using his own experiences to argue for the passage of federal legislation that would bar insurers from using different sets of rules for behavioral health treatment. For example, the bill would make it illegal to charge a different copay amount for a visit to a psychotherapist than for an office visit to a primary-care physician.

After his drug-impaired car crash into a barrier near the U.S. Capitol last May, Kennedy received an outpouring of sympathy from people who had dealt with addiction in their own lives or on the part of a friend or relative. But in general, Kennedy said, society holds people afflicted by addiction and mental illness to a different standard. “People still believe that they ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” he said.

Kennedy and U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad — the bill’s cosponsor, and also Kennedy’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous — are holding a series of field hearings to gather momentum for the bill’s passage and to hear about states’ experiences with behavioral health issues. The hearing in Rhode Island yesterday — at the State House — was the first; the second will take place in Ramstad’s home state of Minnesota next week.

While behavioral health treatments can be pricey, the costs to society of leaving those illnesses untreated are much higher, those who testified said.

Those costs may come in the form of workers’ lost productivity. Marianne Monte, senior vice president for human resources at Bank Rhode Island, spoke about the banking company’s efforts to foster a supportive environment for employees with behavioral health issues. Monte said such support makes for happier and healthier employees, but also helps the company’s bottom line as workers are less likely to take sick days or disability leave and are more productive while at work. Monte said the company purposely decided to keep the same health plan for its workers, rather than switch to a less expensive alternative, because the cheaper plan offered inferior coverage for behavioral health services.

The costs may come in the form of a prison budget. Prisons have become “the largest mental-health wards in the nation,” Providence Police Chief Dean M. Esserman testified.

And the costs may come in the form of an emergency-room bill, when someone gets into a car accident after driving drunk, commits a violent crime while on drugs, or attempts suicide due to depression. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates the total cost of mental illness in the United States at $180 billion a year.

The legislation is modeled on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which covers members of Congress and their families; now Kennedy and Ramstad are asking Congress to extend the same benefits to every American. “They didn’t have any problem voting it for themselves,” Kennedy said.

The bill — titled the “Senator Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act,” after the late senator from Minnesota, who championed the cause before his death in a plane crash in 2002 — has been introduced for the last five years. With bipartisan support — Kennedy is a Democrat, Ramstad a Republican — the bill had more than enough votes to guarantee passage, but the leadership never brought it up for a vote. But with new leadership in place, Kennedy and Ramstad said they have assurances the bill’s fate will be different this year.

The bill has some exceptions: It would not apply to businesses with 50 or fewer employees. And passing a law doesn’t guarantee equal treatment, some warned yesterday.

The congressmen chose to start their hearings in Rhode Island in part because the state already has a parity law; the General Assembly passed it in 1994. But several panelists told of recent struggles with getting access to care, and insurance coverage, for behavioral health.

North Kingstown resident Michael Noonan told the story of his 17-year-old daughter, Erin, who is in a residential treatment program in Illinois for alcoholism.

Noonan said his family went through a months-long odyssey to get coverage for Erin’s treatment — denial of coverage, loss of two appeals, and ultimately a plea to Kennedy’s office for help. In the meantime, Noonan said he took out a $23,000 home-equity loan to pay his daughter’s bills. Noonan, who works as a physical therapist, knows the health-care system and also holds a master’s degree in business. If it was this difficult for him to navigate the system, he said, it must be practically impossible for many people.

He held up a newspaper article about UnitedHealth Group reporting higher-than-expected profits due to holding down costs. During his fight for coverage, Noonan said, “I felt that I was part of that cost control.”

Richard LeClerc, president of Gateway Healthcare, the Pawtucket-based operator of several behavioral-health facilities around the state, said getting payments from insurers is a constant battle, fraught with “significant delays” and “capricious and arbitrary denials,” for his company.

“We’re frequently told that authorization is not needed, then after several months of treatment, payment is denied due to lack of authorization,” he said.

James Purcell, CEO of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, said the state’s largest insurer has gone beyond what’s required by law, for instance, by paying the same rate for a visit to a psychologist as for an office visit to a primary-care physician.

Purcell said Rhode Island’s law would more accurately be called “nearly parity.” For instance, it requires insurers to cover 30 psychotherapy visits a year, but some patients need more, Purcell said.

“Blue Cross fully supports complete parity between behavioral health and physical health,” he said.

Rhonda Robinson-Beale, chief medical officer for UnitedHealthcare of New England, apologized to Noonan for his bad experience with United. She said the company, like Blue Cross, is “completely committed to bring behavioral health benefits consistent with medical coverage.”