How Government Regulation Is Undermining Mental Health Care
October 19, 2015
News Article
Anyone who has given two seconds worth of thought to it knows that school shootings are not occurring because we have a gun problem. They are occurring because we have a mental health problem. So what are we doing about that? Not much. Despite several mental health parity laws, government regulation is one reason why so little is being done. ObamaCare is probably making things worse.
If the market for medical care worked like a normal market, providers would specialize, advertise and actively recruit patients who have problems that need to be solved. But standing between the patients and the providers are third-party payers (employers, insurance companies and government). And in direct response to government regulations, these payers have no interest in solving the problems of the mentally ill.
As I wrote in Priceless, health plans have perverse incentives to attract the healthy and avoid the sick. Once people are enrolled, the plans have perverse incentives to over-provide to the healthy and under-provide to the sick. This is especially true in the case of mental illness.
