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Her Mental Health Treatment Was Helping. That’s Why Insurance Cut Off Her Coverage.
(www.propublica.org)
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
182 points (99.5% liked)
United States | News & Politics
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Honestly, I have to wonder if the cruelty is the point here. Even in the cold light of pure financial terms, it's bad for insurers to behave this like:
Likely some internal incentive program that rewards certain minimum rejection rates. Costs following that are counted elsewhere.
I can definitely believe that. The whole "not my specific budget, not my problem" thing.
Boot licker.
Same thing that most people say about antibiotics. I don't need to finish this, I'm getting better now, and then they relapse and the antibiotics don't work the second time around. Stopping the treatment of a disease when the patient just begins recovery rather than allowing the patient to fully recover is always bad and sometimes means the second try will be that much more difficult as they are traumatized by the poor result of the previous try. "Fine" is not recovered. I was "fine" for 40+ years with undiagnosed ASD and ADHD, because I learned to mask so I appeared "fine". But really I just had to end treatment every time before prior to finding the root causes.
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.
who you gonna believe? me or your lying eyes
So not the patient's psychiatrist. Somebody else.
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.
That is utter bullshit.
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.
Where's your stats and data that back that up??
Narrator: They didn’t have any.
Absolutely not. You can't just stop mental health treatment. It's like they stopped cancer treatment because the tumors started reacting to treatment. They aren't gone, the patient isn't in remission, they're going to die if they don't get more treatment.
Source?
"trust me bro"