SAMHSA Aligned with Managed Care

When you have been as sensitized as I have to the rebranding of mental health services as "behavioral health" by the managed care industry - seeing a government agency promoting that brand is difficult to take.  I got an e-mail from SAMHSA this morning that does exactly that. The subsequent spin on behavioral health and health care reform needs to be read to be believed.  It is something that only a government bureaucrat or managed care administrator could actually believe.

This is an interesting excerpt: "Twenty years ago, even some in the behavioral health field didn't think recovery was possible."  Maybe that was why they were telling me that people in the throes of detoxification were now stable after three days.  Insisting that subscribers to their managed care insurance should be discharged home and that they could go to outpatient treatment despite repeated failures is certainly consistent with that statement.

Their spin on the PPACA is even more incredible with this summary statement: "Providers will also face new payment mechanisms such as capitation, episode rates, and team based payments rather than based on services provided."  That statement alone is proof that nobody at SAMHSA seems to understand that capitation was the primary mechanism that managed care used to dismantle mental health and addiction services to the abysmal level that they currently exist at.   Either that or they understand perfectly. 

This web page confirms what I have been saying for the past twenty years.  The government, in this case the federal government has been colluding with the managed care industry to marginalize the expertise of professionals and to continue to disproportionately ration care to anyone with a mental illness or an addiction.  The managed care industry and federal and state governments can spin that anyway that they want, but they can't get rid of the dismal record of the past 20 years or the fact that the government is now obviously promoting it.