Spare me the exceptions (who have 6 month+ waiting lists)—
I’m wondering why the few therapists and Psychiatrists in this state who ARE on insurance seem to be dropping their insurance panels left and right.
What is Washington State doing wrong these days?
But I wasn't even suggesting any of that, I'm struggling to even comprehend how what you said has anything to do with what I was saying.
This started up around these comments
My last therapist told me they could bill my insurance, get rejected, then bill me the cost plus the cost of their time attempting to bill.... or they could just charge me cash.
To which you replied
it would have been a response to the capitalistic rot in their brains.
And later
We're also here talking about how therapists don't want to work with insurance because it's "too much work".
therapists are lazy
You have made it clear you think therapists should be doing more work for the same or less pay.
That's a stretch of what I meant.
The problem here is you think working with insurance should be considered extra work. I think that working with insurance should be considered baseline given we live in a society where insurance is practically required for most if not all of the population.
So I don't think they need to work harder, I think they need to work as hard as they are supposed to be working when they signed up for this profession. I don't think they're doing enough work right now, they're taking the easy way out, doing less work for the same amount of money if not more money.
Our entire healthcare industry requires having insurance unless you're rich and can afford out of pocket all the time, in which that is a privilege not many people have.
Given that our society is so insurance centric, working with insurance should be considered baseline. The amount of money they get paid after working with insurance should be their baseline expectation of pay.
If they take clients that do not work with insurance and can pay out of pocket that should simply be considered easy money, but not the norm.
What's happening now is all the therapists are refusing to work with insurance because they're all trying to make that easy money.
Which I would 100% understand if this wasn't a profession centered around helping others in some capacity. There's a code of ethics that a lot of therapists have and are taught in schools and I think choosing easy money when so many people can't afford to do that should be frowned upon.
Plus, a capitalist mindset would have you thinking "Well of course, why wouldn't someone work less for more money?" and that is part of the problem.
I believe you said that humans tend to take the path of least resistance, but that's just saying the quiet part out loud. That's robbing individuals in the therapy industry of being able to refuse to take the path of least resistance when it puts so many people at a disadvantage.
And frankly it's classist and elitist for you to think it's ok to have entire swaths of people unable to access mental health services because therapists are too lazy or greedy to work with insurance.
Well said.
Fwiw I don’t think entire swaths should not have access to healthcare. I think I already said that but I’ll say it again. I just think the insurance industry needs reformed. At the very least it shouldn’t be an open question if any individual is covered or not. It should be one click. And on top of that the government should subsidize or provide coverage for low income people.
There’s two ways to change human behavior. Norms and regulations. You’re arguing for norms. I’m arguing for regulations. Your last comment convinced me you have a point. I’m reminded of Bushido and how Japan has a much healthier ratio of CEO pay compared to the US for example. You made me realize I don’t want to say norms are meaningless. They aren’t they’re important. But I still think we need to make it easy to do the right thing. It’s absurd that in this techy age it’s not as easy to take insurance than cash.
It's interesting when you put it that way, "norms" and "regulations" as two sides of the same coin as far as effecting change.
I also want regulation, but at the same time I do believe we are way too far down the wrong path to effectively change regulations within any meaningful time frame, so that's why I shy away from relying solely on regulation. It's a good long term goal, but not effective in the short term.
And then you have the argument of how deep insurance company's pockets are that fund lobbying and marketing campaigns to keep things the way they are. Right now if therapists aren't using insurance, insurance doesn't have to pay out for therapy, so this allows insurance companies to keep money. So that's an uphill battle against a huge industry that likes the status quo right now. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the current way that things are right now is by design of the insurance companies through lobbying.
Then in addition to that, if you normalize the current practices of therapists, then people will likely be less motivated to change. Like if therapists as a whole in Seattle just get comfortable not taking insurance and get comfortable denying or pricing themselves out of people relying on insurance, then there's no change.
Maybe if therapists were pressured through norms to work with insurance despite it being easier not to, they'd get sick and tired of being forced to work with insurance, maybe that'd motivate them to support regulation of insurance companies.
Right now they're making more money with less hassle, so why would they ultimately care about any regulation of insurance companies? This is where I think norms should step in to make it frowned upon to not work with insurance as opposed to normalized or accepted.
Sure, you can argue that the discarded insurance patients could also support regulation in numbers greater than therapists, but in general I think most of the potential patients are unreliable when it comes to voting for various reasons, some of which ironically enough probably need to be addressed by therapy.