Health Insurance and Psychiatry

A Health Care Plan So Simple, Even A Republican Can Understand! is Ann Coulter's new article advocating the free market regarding healthcare. It's good. I have a point to add:

INSURANCE COMPANY: That will be $700 a month, the deductible is $35,000, no decent hospital will take it, and you have to pay for doctor's visits yourself. But your plan covers shrinks, infertility treatments, sex change operations, autism spectrum disorder treatment, drug rehab and 67 other things you will never need.

Unfortunately, having coverage of things you will never need isn't merely wasted money (or, essentially, hidden taxes to pay for other people). In some cases it's actively harmful. Rather than paying for zero value, it's paying for negative value.

The main issue is involuntary psychiatry. It's harder to subject people to unwanted "treatments" when you have to find someone to pay for it. The victim doesn't want to pay, the people who don't like the victim usually don't want to pay, and the mental prison won't pay. So who pays? Sometimes the government steps in to pay, but not always. You know what makes it easier to victimize someone? When the victim's insurance company pays. You can have a psychiatric "treatment" you don't want -- such as being imprisoned without a trial -- paid for by your own insurance company, against your will. Sometimes this makes the difference and gets you imprisoned when you wouldn't have been otherwise due to lack of funding.

Unfortunately, millions of Americans are harmed by psychiatrists every year, so this kind of issue is not as rare as one might wish. I provide some details on this in the next section, below.

There's also a milder scenario, which is you're pressured to see a psychiatrist. Or you're pressured to make your kid see a psychiatrist. Pressure can come from a teacher, friend, spouse or boss. Sometimes the pressure is tiny, and sometimes it's heavy pressure. And if you don't have insurance, you can use price as an excuse not to go or not to send your child. But if your insurance (or employer, school, or government) will pay, then you'll have to come up with some other reason to resist the pressure. Losing a particularly convenient, socially-acceptable excuse to say "no" will result in some unwanted trips to psychiatrists for some people.

So it's worth cash not to have psychiatric coverage. It'd be worth paying a higher monthly premium for it to exclude psychiatry coverage, if that were allowed (it's not). How much it's worth to get rid of psychiatric coverage is difficult to judge, but it's something.

It's the same with drug rehab. Suppose I took drugs for some reason, and then my friends were all pushing me to go to rehab but I wanted to quit on my own at home. The price of rehab – which my friends wouldn't want to pay – would be a good excuse that would help me resist their pressure and stay home.

I also wouldn't want coverage for any kind of "help" from social workers.

An interesting case is marital counseling. That can have value to people who go voluntarily, but it can also hurt people who are pressured into it. Even surgery depends. It's possible for a sports player to be pressured into a risky, expensive surgery that wouldn't have happened without an insurance company to pay for it.

The big picture is it's actively bad for you to have money readily available to pay for things you don't want. It's easier to avoid harm when finding money to pay for it is an extra obstacle in the way of it happening.

Also: read Thomas Szasz's short article, The Myth Of Health Insurance.

Psychiatric Harm

Just in California, there are over 300,000 involuntary psychiatric imprisonment orders per year. Many are converted to "voluntary" status because they will be locked up longer if they don't. Sucking up to one's captors is the standard path to freedom, rather than standing up for yourself. Many people are released quickly if they confess they were in the wrong and take a drug which causes brain damage.

Any time during a 72 hour hold, the doctor may arbitrarily place the victim on a 14 day hold if he wants to. At the end of the 14 day hold, the doctor may add another 30 days if he wants to. Meanwhile, family members are discouraged from showing up at all if a probable cause hearing takes place. And the probable cause "hearings" do not involve standard legal protections like excluding hearsay from counting as evidence. Victims commonly don't even get to wear normal clothes, they are forced to wear a hospital gown which is prejudicial.

In Florida, 194,354 involuntary (Baker Act) examinations were done in one year, and the number has been increasing significantly over time. This count intentionally ignores up to another 5,952 instances where the examiner forgot to write the date on the form. These involuntary examinations can last over 72 hours. This number includes children who were 22% of the victims. Roughly half of time time this is initiated by "mental health professionals", and half the time by law enforcement. Children are more likely to be victimized on school days. 22.7% more men are victimized than women, which the sexist report downplays as "slightly more" men.

The Florida numbers are substantial underestimates about psychiatry's reach. How many people say "no" to an authority when told they can agree to be examined now, and if they hesitate, are told their alternative is a legal order that they be examined anyway by a now-hostile examiner and lose their rights for 72 hours? That's common and documented.

The California Hospital Association says 4.1% of American adults are labelled seriously mentally ill per year and 58.7% of them receive some form of "treatment". After a little math, that means 6 million American adults per year are labelled seriously mentally ill and then have something done to them by psychiatry.

This is scary stuff. And there's a lot more info like it, and plenty that's worse. E.g. look up the present day use of electroshock "therapy" (torture) and lobotomy in the US. The FDA actually came out in favor of electroshock last year.

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