Her Mental Health Treatment Was Helping. That’s Why Insurance Cut Off Her Coverage.
Her Mental Health Treatment Was Helping. That’s Why Insurance Cut Off Her Coverage.
Providers, patients and even some federal judges say progress-based insurance denials harm patients at key moments of mental health treatment.
Friend, I think you've drunk the Kool-aid.
The only reason the ADA can get away with recommending you brush your teeth 120 minues a month is, tooth brushes are cheep. The product don't cost insurance companies a dime. If tooth brushes cost $150 + an hour, you'd get 6 a year, so long as you'd met your deductible.
Mental health services are not just for folks who aren't doing well. Mental health services are prophylactic! To say that only folks not doing well need metal health services is medical model propaganda that the profit driven insurance industry wants you as a provider to buy into. They know they're screwing you over too! Remember when they made you sign a contract to not share your payout rates with other clinicians so you can't collectively bargain? The mental health parity act languished for ~ 16 years, and it's still a joke.
The term "Medical necessity" is corporate speak for "lower profits", and implies providers would be wide spread abusing the system if not for constant oversight. Meanwhile, they make billions on you, and your colleagues stolen labor.
On the other hand, it's not like there are thousands of psychologists sitting around all day with nothing to do.
The best solution is to make it easier to become a mental health professional. More scholarships, more lower level training.
Before making it easier to become a mental health professional, we might think about retention. The APA figured a decade ago 65% of PhD (Psychology, not Psychiatry) students dropped out before program completion. The number that I've seen floated, but can't find a source other than from the UK is, 89% of mental health practitioners leave the field within two years of graduation. Poor pay, and insurance industry woes are almost aways cited as top reasons why.
What's silly is for profit healthcare.
Our healthcare industry is just a massive profiteering racket.
... Yes. It's a society. Society should bear the costs of what the most vulnerable need.
How is paying for prophylactic counseling any different than paying for routine checkups?
Like surely you have patients who need meds or their lives fall apart but are otherwise doing just fine? Quick check in once a month and everyone goes on their merry way?
Why should somebody's access to care be compromised because they are feeling better? This isn't bronchitis these are lifelong conditions
They should pay for prophylactic counseling?
Yes, because prevention is superior to treatment after the fact in both outcomes & overall cost.
Though it seems you have a differing understanding of "Medically Necessary" to my own so i suspect we won't agree on this.
"For profit healthcare" is a misnomer is should be called something like "profit equilibrium maintenance : healthcare edition"
The best outcome for a "for profit" is profit, not healthcare. Given the choice between larger profits and better healthcare outcomes the profit will win out, every time.
The point of the article was about how the patients in question were only doing better(ish) due to intensive help from the therapists and still needed time.
From a lay persons view “better” does not equal doesn’t need continued therapy by a long shot and I’d rather have people use more therapy than they need than the other way around due to the outsize harms of getting that decision wrong.
i pity your patients
such arrogance, such lack of self awareness or empathy. such projection. read the room clown. "i know this will be unpopular" isn't a magic phrase that will make the unsupported things you say in direct contradiction to our lived experiences as patients somehow valid. blackstone's reasoning applies here. at least to us as patients... i guess you dont have something comparable in an oath.
I'm tempted to say some uncharitable things about the reputational damage your statements tend to do to your profession, but i would just be rehashing the comments you've made, and i think people already get the gist.
I know trying to have a rational discussion about policy on lemmy is as likely as having one on Truth Social, but I got irritated enough to engage. That was dumb of me. I'm done
You think people go to therapy for fun or what?
Somebody who'll sit and listen to them talk about themselves for an hour? Oh, hell yeah!
