Rober

I practice in community mental health for the majority of my week. I witness, first hand, the draconian maneuverings of insurance companies in their attempts to skate out of paying for necessary clinical care. Under the rather sanctimonious cover of "cost-effective care," and prodded on by Big Pharma, they push pills as the solution for everything under the sun from simple depression, to PTSD, to schizophrenia and then, to add insult to injury, anything beyond 30 days worth of pills requires a pre-auth! They won't pay for brand names either, if a crappy generic is available. But the most horrendous thing to me is that they seem to think that mental health care is simply a matter of ridding a patient of a symptom. He11, you can do that with vodka, crack, and heroin - as millions of mentally ill people already have - making matters much, much worse in the long run. To your basic HMO, mental health care has been trivialized down to symptom abatement - at which point they consider the condition to be "in remission" and no longer worthy of attention - or coverage. Horse****!