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Will
Your Health Insurance Cover Psychotherapy
Summary: Should psychotherapy be covered by your health insurance
or not? Learn the secrets that you should be cognizant of when
signing up with a new insurance plan. Psychotherapy can result in
lowering the cost of medical treatments that are covered.
Today, more people are turning to psychologists and psychiatrists
who are experts in human behavior to help them define problem
issues in their personal lives and working relationships.
Frequently, they also have concerns about how to pay for the
treatment since until a few years ago, coverage for mental health
problems was often excluded from health plans. These ‘exclusions’
were usually based upon the fact that many health issues are hard
to define medically and that treatments were expensive and
generally continued for a lengthy period of time.
Patients electing to have psychotherapy often recognize that they
have one or more problems they can’t resolve themselves. However,
it is rare indeed when the patient has any real understanding of
where the problem arose from and how to deal with it. Here, the
trained psychologist or psychiatrist is not challenged to provide
the patient with a quick reading on the problem; mental health
issues don’t ordinarily lend themselves to quick fixes. Instead,
these medical professionals are skilled in leading the patient
through a complicated maze of factors and helping him or her to
understand how they contribute to the problem. This is an ongoing
process that requires numerous weekly counseling sessions
generally lasting 50-60 minutes. Based upon hourly charges of
$120-150 per hour, it’s easy to understand how the total cost may
be quite significant.
Times have changed over the last decade or so with regard to the
coverage afforded by health insurance plans for mental health
treatment. Now, most insurers do provide some coverage but usually
with limitations on time and total costs. As a rule, when a
psychologist or psychologist files a claim for payment, he must
specify the disorder for which he is treating the client. If the
patient is seeing the doctor for help with personal problems like
family relationships or work-related issues, the therapist has to
determine a diagnosis for a disorder that is covered and report
this to the insurance company. This is necessary because while
some issues are important to the patient, they may not be
considered medically necessary by the insurer.
Since most health plans, be they individual or group, will
probably pay for only a portion of the total costs for treatment,
it falls upon the patient to cover the remainder. In many cases,
lack of adequate finances causes the patient to cease therapy
before he should. If the patient is 65 or older, a U.S. citizen
and qualified for Medicare, all or most of the costs he incurs
will most likely be covered.
One reason medical insurers are improving their coverage of mental
health care lies in their growing recognition that some forms of
psychotherapy go a long way toward decreasing the patient’s
anxiety which, in turn, gives rise to pain, nausea and fatigue.
This underscores their understanding that mental health problems
can be significant contributors to a patient’s physical health.
Thus, it has been demonstrated that the psychotherapy actually can
result in lowering the cost of medical treatments that are
covered.
Original Article
Source:
http://www.medicalneeds.com |
