Question

Why is mental health disorder historically not covered/less covered by health insurance than other “physical” diseases?

Answer 1

The main reasons are ageism and stigmatization leading to persistent appearance of disease or disorder symptoms in case of mental health. Mental health disorders include a lot of “dependence” “and “relocation”. In case of schozppherinia or mania the symptoms are persisting. Unipolar or bipolar depression sometimes leading to abnormal symptoms which are recurrently appears and difficult to treat and it consumes a lot of premium. Thereby insurance companies usually show reluctance to give health insurance policies to mental health patients compared to normal physical disease which can be treatable by the physicians successfully.

Affordable Care act (ACA) introduced in 2010 aims to expand the health insurance to provide better mental health care to the public. So, the physicians can look after a wide range of cases and also provide preventive care, and actually most people are being benefited from this.

But the distinctions are also clear because the Government left the decision of definitions that apply to package to the individual states, so they vary from state to state. Screening of mental health in primary care, preventive services, non-traditional treatment services and crises services are not covered by these definitions and mostly it varies from country to country. This means people are not allowed to have unlimited mental health care services. Also there is a problem with the lack of adequate number of work force in the mental health field.

ICD-9-CM & ICD-10-CM:

These are the diagnosing coding system widely used before performing diagnosis or even surgery in United States according rules established by HIPAA in order to report inpatient services predominantly pertaining to health insurance claims and associated encounter forms.

As diagnostic tests are recommended for the exact diagnosis of the problem, prescribing too many tests to avoid being suited for missed or delayed diagnosis is harmful to the patient. Actually this is in reaction to raising costs of malpractice insurance premiums. As patient cannot take decision on treatment strategy physician should be the decision maker, but the practice of defective medicine should be avoided.