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The issue is that mental health providers are grouped separately from other doctors and health care professionals on the insurance side. Different insurers, acc
by staticautomatic 7y ago
The issue is that mental health providers are grouped separately from other doctors and health care professionals on the insurance side. Different insurers, accordingly, have dramatically different networks of mental health professionals which vary in size and quality mostly depending on the reimbursement rate. Low-paying insurers have worse networks. Some don't even manage their own mental health benefits. In the bay area, for example, Blue Shield's benefits are managed by another insurer named Magellan with famously shitty rates and a correspondingly shitty network of available professionals.
- perl4ever 7y agoPerhaps, but specific problems of the bay area or some insurance networks being insufficient are beside my point. The providers that exist are generally in-network with the insurance plans I'm aware of in my area, it's just that they seem to be overtaxed and mostly not taking new patients. I'm saying, in an area where $50K a year is a decent living, and people take for granted that an actual MD is not available in most cases, why is $70+/hr not translating into supply? It reminds me of my former employer, which was not healthcare, but they were billing clients something like five times what they paid staff, and yet their response was never to try to increase the hours billed and hire more people, but only to squeeze and squeeze costs and shrink through attrition as though they were losing money. As a matter of fact, I really should ask someone I know who works for NAMI.