The Fiscal Times: Sarah Kliff- 'Six Things You Don't Know about Mental Healthcare Costs'

Source:The Fiscal Times- with a look at mental health care in America.

"In the wake of the Newtown school massacre, many have called for a stronger mental health safety net as one way to reduce violent shootings. Shooters in previous massacres had unmet mental health needs. By widening access to services, the thinking goes, professionals could intervene before a tragedy occurs." 

From The Fiscal Times

If something is worth doing and you have the money to do it, then it's worth paying for. And mental healthcare in America is not only something that's worth doing, but something we simply have to do to prevent future tragedies like Aurora and Newtown and unfortunately many others from happening in America. 

It's really that simple, we either pay for mental healthcare up front up, or we pay for it down the road with mentally challenged and irresponsible people making horrible decisions that results in the deaths of many people who otherwise didn't have to die. 

It gets to do we either want to pay for mental health care with our money up front, or do we want to pay for not by funding mental health care with our money up front and paying for it in high health care costs down the road with people getting free health care at the rest of us expense. And we losing more innocent lives down the road. 

It's that simple, we can fund mental health care in America, because we have the resources to do, or we choose not to and pay for it in higher health care costs down the road as well as costs in innocent human life.

Funding mental health care in America is fairly simple and will mean higher health care costs up front. Especially if we don't do anything further to reform our unaffordable health care system, because what we need to do is pass a law that would require all health insurers private and public to cover mental health care for their customers. Which means premiums would rise in the short run, because more health care would be covered. And the costs for Medicare and Medicaid would go up in the short run as well, but we need to seriously reform both Medicare and Medicaid anyway and get those costs under control. 

We also need to add mental health care to what they cover as well for reasons I've already laid out, but what I just laid out for mental health care just goes to cover patients and the mental health care that they receive. 

And for patients who need to be institutionalized, we need to adequately fund our mental hospitals especially the public ones and that means making mental patients eligible for public assistance while they are institutionalized for the ones who can't afford the stay on their own.

It really gets down to priorities and what we need to be paying for as a nation and health care is clearly one of those things including mental health care and is one of the failures of the 2010 Affordable Care Act that they didn't cover mental health care in that legislation and is something we are still paying for as a nation almost three years later after that legislation became law. And something we need to finally do to prevent future tragedies from happening in the future.