Money and madness: why mental-health parity is a costly fraud! U.S. surgeon general admits diagnoses of psychiatric mental disorders is not science

* Charles N. Kahn III, president of the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), testified before Congress in 1999 that coverage for psychiatric hospital stays alone already had increased premiums by 12 percent.

* In Maryland, a 1992 Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association study documented "the most expensive individual benefits were estimated to be substance-abuse and mental-health-care services." Outpatient mental-health-care visits increased more than 78 percent once mandates were expanded--from 448,000 in 1983 to 800,000 in 1986.

The NFIB, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the HIAA are among the many organizations opposed to the parity legislation. According to Randy Clerihue, a spokesman for HIAA, "We don't like this bill because it's going to raise the cost of health care. It's not that we don't think mental-health services aren't important, but we don't think government should be mandating the kind of insurance employers purchase on behalf of their employees. The problem comes when you have a mandate that forces everyone to pay for something whether they want it or not. We're headed in the direction of mandating everyone out of health insurance."

Each of the many business and insurance groups with which INSIGHT spoke expressed similar sentiments and each was aware of a little-discussed fact: While lawmakers seem prepared to force private insurers to pay for the increase in insurance premiums for mental disorders, which then will be passed along to employees in the form of higher costs and lost take-home pay, the federal government itself is not included--neither Medicare nor Medicaid are included in the mandate. Imagine the uproar if payments for these had to be increased 40 percent or so!

Bruce Wiseman, U.S. national president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a nonprofit organization committed to ending abuses in psychiatry, tells INSIGHT. "The government won't include Medicare and Medicaid in parity legislation because they know the taxpayers couldn't afford it--it would break the bank. And even excluding those programs it will break the bank because mental illness is subjective."

According to Wiseman, "Numerous studies show psychiatrists tend strongly to use health-insurance benefits up to the point that they are exhausted, at which point the patient is declared cured. For instance, a person is found to have anxiety disorder up to the insurance cap, whereupon the psychiatrist tells them they no longer have it. This kind of diagnosing would milk the system dry. In this legislation, the government is saying that if there's a million-dollar cap on treating a patient's cancer then there has to be a million-dollar cap on treating shyness when it is called social-anxiety disorder. So once the person gets `treated' the bill reaches the cap and they're pronounced cured. Such diagnoses will run insurance costs into the stratosphere. Parity legislation is ripe for abuse if for no other reason than bogus diagnosis."