Fictional mental health care

ANOTHER VIEW

A report finds health insurers often list providers who can't really be found. That's a stunning and dangerous disservice to people in need of care.

We hear about the need for mental health care all the time. We hear about children harmed by the turmoil and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. We're told that "doing something about mental illness" is a key part of reducing gun violence. Lawmakers talk of making sure that mental health services are covered just like any other kind of health care.

And if you look at the subscriber manuals of health insurance companies, you might think all that mental health care is there for the asking. Except, it turns out, it often is not.

That's the maddening bottom line of a report from New York Attorney General Letitia James' office, which found, in just a sampling, that 86 percent of mental health providers listed on health plans' networks were not really available. These so-called "ghosts" were either unreachable, not really in the network, or not accepting new patients. Some of the worst offenders were the Capital District Physicians Health Plan, which the survey found had a 92 percent ghost rate, and MVP - a survey of 24 Albany providers in that network found that all of them were ghosts.

The result, the report found, is that people either seek out-of-network mental health care - often at higher cost - or forgo it altogether. That leaves a society full of people with untreated mental health issues, especially lower income people.

It's troubling that it was the attorney general who uncovered this widespread problem, not the agencies that oversee insurance and mental health services in New York - not, that is, the state Department of Health, the Office of Mental Health or the Department of Financial Services, the latter of which oversees the insurance industry.

The attorney general's report recommends, among other things, that the state require insurers to conduct more regular surveillance of the situation, such as "secret shopper" surveys like those her office did to keep tabs on the accuracy of their network directories. They should make sure, too, that people are able to schedule mental health care appointments in a reasonably short period of time.

The report also urged health plans to actively recruit and work to keep mental health care providers in their networks, and to ensure greater diversity so that people with specific language or cultural needs can access mental health care.

Those are sound recommendations, as far as they go. But they don't get to what's really the heart of the problem - a shortage of mental health care providers not just in New York, but across the country.

New York actually ranks better than most states, with relatively fewer areas in the state with deficient numbers of mental health care providers, according to data gathered by KFF, a health policy research organization. Still, New York could do more to improve its residents' access to mental health care.

The state, for example, is one of only a few that are not part of a growing Psychology Interjurisdictional Compact, which allows telepsychology across state lines without practitioners already licensed in one state having to go through long, costly, state-by-state certifications.

The pandemic showed that nontraditional ways of delivering care - such as telemedicine - can be done responsibly. The governor and Legislature should look in the coming session at ways to broaden access across state lines.

- Albany (N.Y.) Times Union