@Yanny:
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase Public Health Services for Mental Health Care.
Right now, insurance companies are only required to pay 50% of Mental Health Care costs.
Our plan would pass a law requiring patients to only pay 15% copayments, and insurance companies must cover the other 85% of costs, to all Autism treatment related charges.
The burden of funding would be placed upon the Insurance Companies of America. This would mean a very small increase in Insurance rates, if the company decides to increase the rates at all. Assuming every single company decides to increase rates to fit the added cost, this adds a 12,852,000,000 price tag.
Whatever other smokescreens I might use, my “negative” will relentlessly hammer away at the private vs. public funding & administration question in the solution to your otherwise eminently logical proposal.
As we are not speaking about a country with a nationally socialized medical insurance program (and though on this point I may envy my brothers to the north), it comes down to who should and will pay. And I believe I can make the case (as I am taking the position of a lobbyist for the healthcare insurance industry) that spiraling costs of healthcare – prescription drugs, physician and psychiatric liaison, reimbursement bookkeeping and record management, patient services, etc., etc., etc. – have already pressed our fine industry to the breaking point. Some very well run companies, exemplars of our sacred system of free enterprise, would go bankrupt if forced to take on this added burden.
What those who propose this proposal do not understand is that the insurance industry is already subsidizing even the paying of 50% of costs to treat Austism. We shift much of the real cost in order to provide these treatments to these deserving patients. But $12.9 billion is no small uptick in expenses! We are literally talking bankruptcy here, because the Federal Govt has been and will continue to cut back on Medicaid and other special reimbursement funds – not increase them – and there is enormous additional burden upon the healthcare industry in attempting to recoup such costs.
Increasing payments from 50% to 85% is a 70% increase in cost! (35/50 = 0.70)
What other industry would be asked to increase their cost burden per client by 70% – and at the same time to dramatically increase the number of clients they serve?
If the Federal Funds are not forthcoming – and sadly, they will not be, not in this time of repeated tax cuts, budget deficits, a recession-mode economy, more unemployment, and a call from the highest levels of government for shifting of education, healthcare and welfare costs to private charities – then this $12.9 billion burden will fall upon an industry already under huge pressures. And then who will suffer? Well, the patients and their families and their communities!
The quality of care will actually diminish for each individual patient, because the healthcare industry will be forced to spread current resources to care for many more patients. With this decline in quality of care, the rate of a complete treatment cycle of three years will no longer hold up. And then we will see the burden shift to the only place it can – upon the schools, already under great duress to sustain special education programs. Thus the federal government would be at a disadvantage, running a triage operation as under-treated patients bog down the resources at unprepared schools.
A better solution is to increase the service level in the schools to begin with! Each federal dollar spent in the public daycare and school environment goes much farther per patient than a dollar spent through the insurance reimbursement system. Let us not penalize the patient! Let us increase and improve the care level in the schools!
Bleah blah I rest my case etc.
Ciao for now
