BEFORE I really begin, let me make one personal recommendation to you: If you are
going to get a disease — choose your organ carefully — because if you have heart
failure, you can get a pacemaker; if you have pancreas failure, you can get an insulin
pump; if you have kidney failure, you can get put on dialysis — but if you have brain
failure, you can get put in jail. And I mean today, in America; right here in good old
Chapel Hill.
Only for the diseases of the brain called mental illness are people arrested for their
symptoms.
Can you imagine your child suffering from a disease — but it hasn’t killed him yet —
then watching him being denied treatment because your insurance (and I quote) “only
hospitalizes for matters of life and death”? Then after your child leaves the hospital, still
with a deadly disease, you have to watch him get arrested for his symptoms.
I don’t have to imagine, I’ve been there. My child had a brain disorder. And he was
insured as a minor, and I had insurance coverage — as a state employee.
With schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder or any other mental illness which manifests itself
in psychosis, you can be arrested (and people are, every day) for manifesting its
symptoms — delusions, hallucinations, paranoia. Isn’t it punishment enough to lose
your job, your home and your family, as many do when they are hospitalized? Wouldn’t
treatment be better for us all?
A bill before the U.S. Congress now, informally called the Mental Health Parity Act,
would help do that. It would require mental illness be treated like other diseases by
insurance companies — a bill the New York Times said “it looks as if Congress may be
ready” to pass. Please note the word “may.”
I have often said that I could convince anyone with either a heart or a brain that the
government should do its part to insure that people with mental illness get early and
effective treatment.
For those with a heart, I call for compassion to help those who cannot, by virtue of their
diseases, help themselves. If government is to help anyone, it would be them.
For those with only a brain, I point out how much more expensive it is to support
someone for a lifetime, than it is to treat the illness early, and how much more cost
effective treatment centers are than jails and prisons, where many of those with severe
mental illness are today — simply because they did not get appropriate treatment. And
we will all be better off if people disabled by brain disorders have safe and decent
places to live rather than being left untreated and homeless with begging and petty
theft as their only means of support.
Mental health insurance parity is one step towards getting treatment to those with
mental illness.
People with mental illness, just like people with any other illness, need to be treated so
that their diseases don’t progress into lifetime disabilities. The health insurance system
is one way we should do that. Currently, most health insurance policies do not cover
mental illness like they do other illnesses. Because of what amounts to a system-wide
insurance embargo on paying for treatment for mental illness, many episodes of mental
illness go untreated until the individuals are so ill that they must be hospitalized —
usually at great public expense.
Only an estimated 20% of children and adolescents with mental illnesses currently
receive treatment. Because of this many lives are unnecessarily destroyed by these
diseases.
Fixing this gap in coverage would not be expensive, and in the long run will save our
society money as permanent disabilities and revolving door hospitalizations are
prevented. The Congressional Budget Office estimates requiring coverage for mental
illness will increase the average premium about 1% the cost of the current average
benefit.
Beyond the simple issue of fairness to those struck by mental illness, this would be
modest investment in the health of people of our society.
Email or call 1-800-614-2803 to send a message to ours senators, Richard Burr and
Elizabeth Dole, and to our congressman, David Price, to express your views on mental
health parity. Let them know you are a voter and leave your name, phone number and
address, so there won’t be any doubt. Your call or email could make a difference.
Gary D. Gaddy is friend and an advocate for those with mental illness who lives in
Orange County, NC.
A version of this column was published in the Chapel Hill News on March 28,
2007. Copyright 2007 Gary D. Gaddy
garygaddy.com 