We must move America beyond MC and Managed Competition. Patients and clinicians have become powerless, dominated by greedy, dishonest, and uncaring corporate dictatorships that are taking billions of dollars out of the system at the cost of our citizens' lives and well-being and at the cost of our professions. Clinicians and hospitals are chosen and retained if they make a profit for the managed care company, not because of their skill, training, or ethics. MC has also brought us an outrageous lack of privacy as detailed information about patients is put into the insurer's computers. This invasion into privacy humiliates and re-traumatizes mental health patients.
Clinicians feel forced into betraying their own patients' needs for privacy.
MC's incentives and directives to under treat are immoral. Drastic cuts in psychiatric hospital admissions, lengths of stay, and aftercare has brought an increase in re-hospitalizations, patient injuries and patient deaths due to suicide and the inability of the mentally ill to take care of themselves. MC has destroyed psychotherapy and replaced it with a superficial model of crisis intervention, usually limiting therapy to about 3-12 sessions, regardless of the problem. Even children are being deprived of psychotherapy and forced to take medications because the insurer wants a quick fix. Managed mental health care will never help us solve our problems with homelessness, psychosis, crime, suicide, teen pregnancy, child abuse, spouse abuse, and the many troubled children who grow up to be troubled adults who raise another generation of troubled children, because MC does not want to spend the money and doesn't care about people.