Getting mental health care covered by insurance can be really tough. Reporters spoke to hundreds of therapists who left their insurance networks to find out why.
It’s not easy being a therapist. It’s not easy treating patients and dealing with their peculiarities. Now, add dealing with insurance companies whose primary goal seems to be to pay the least amount possible for mental healthcare, and it makes sense to me why so many therapists drop out of insurance networks.
The stories in the article below will make you angry at insurance companies. That’s fair. There is plenty of blame there. I want you to remember that even in a country with universal health care, there are similar issues where government bureaucrats make the same decisions as private insurance bureaucrats in the US. They get to decide how much mental healthcare is too much, and they don’t usually err on the side of making sure the patient has enough care.
There’s blame there, too.
We can also blame the people who don’t enforce the rules in the US. Mental healthcare is supposed to be equal to physical healthcare, but we know that isn’t what happens. Parity laws exist but are frequently ignored. Let me give you an example. When I injured my knee a few years ago, I had 12 sessions of physical therapy paid for by insurance. It was a relatively minor injury, but had it been worse or required surgery, I have no doubt that would have happened.
Many employee plans will only pay for eight mental health therapy sessions annually. If your needs are more complicated than that, you’ll have trouble getting affordable insurance to cover those expenses. This story makes clear that even if your therapist wants you to get that level of treatment, they are powerless to help you get insurance coverage.
That’s a problem that we have not addressed. Things won’t get better until we do.