Providers, patients and even some federal judges say progress-based insurance denials harm patients at key moments of mental health treatment.
Providers, patients and even some federal judges say progress-based insurance denials harm patients at key moments of mental health treatment.
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They aren’t doctors, or they aren’t the patient’s doctor. They sometimes don’t even have a specialization in the treatment they deny coverage for.
Completely unqualified.
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So not the patient’s psychiatrist. Somebody else.
who you gonna believe? me or your lying eyes
That is utter bullshit.
He’s right that there’s a therapist shortage but
a) that’s because it’s a low-to-medium-wage job where people just trauma dump the worst moments of their lives on you for an hour. Insurance does NOT like paying out for hours of human labor from anyone including nurses (my field) but at least with me each patient is only getting fractional hours, usually about a sixth or less of each hour billed depending on my assignment for the night. So my pay rate is somewhat similar, but it’s for six patients at a time. That therapist is billing for a full hour per patient. The health insurance is gonna haggle pretty aggressively over that rate.
b) it’s also a symptom of the widespread destruction of natural social support systems in favor of commoditized human interaction. A lot of long term therapy users probably wouldn’t need therapy long term if we were properly maintaining and hosting social spaces and events. There’s been a lot said about the steady dismantling of free “thirdspaces” or spaces that aren’t your work or home that you can go to purely to socialize / mingle with other people. There are still a few libraries and parks but even those are getting funding cuts. If the rich hadn’t figured out how to bill us for the bread and circuses, a lot of people would be more mentally and socially healthy to begin with and wouldn’t have to pay for social interaction.
Neither of those problems is best solved by dumping people out of therapy, the root causes need to be addressed first.
Oh that I agree with. It’s the whole, “most people don’t improve after 16 sessions” bit they had going. A lot of people out there require years of work to become functional again and the last thing they want to hear is that they’re a lost cause because they weren’t functional after a few months of therapy. Especially because it’s not true and because there’re far better ways to move someone into an outpatient/maintenance treatment plan than, “we yanked your funding because we think you’re actually okay now.” As the article explains, that kind of rug pull causes serious mental distress. It would cause anyone mental distress to have a support yanked out from under them, but people who are already struggling will obviously have worse outcomes.
Only the criteria here was, “You have made progress.” And “You are not a danger to yourself or others.”. There is no condition about having to be at a point where you are no longer making progress, only that the person is no longer suicidal/homicidal at the current stage of progress. This isn’t at all saying the patient wouldn’t benefit from further therapy. That’s not a condition for the “medical necessity” in this case. If your only criteria is that the person is somewhat improved and not in an emergency situation, then there is a high likelihood of regression upon cessation of medical intervention in any field of medicine. Hoping that they’ll be able to get help again before they become suicidal/homicidal again is not a strategy and usually ends in tragedy. Most times they don’t even bother to seek help. This case the person went to the ER, but often that’s not going to happen if the person considers the cost of the Ambulance, ER, and hospitalization on top of the mental energy required to make the call and then explain your whole history to someone new and then justify your need for the services. It’s unreasonable to expect a good outcome the more times the person has a bad outcome.
Where’s your stats and data that back that up??
Narrator: They didn’t have any.