You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The issues implicit in the implementation of national health insurance are of vital concern to mental health practitioners. The United States is the only industrial nation that has not yet instituted a comprehensive health insurance program, and it seems certain that a plan will eventually be adopted. Questions such as what benefits will be provided, whose service will be reimbursed, and how the program will be funded, need answers.
If mental health coverage is provided, the disciplines of psychology, social work, and psychoanalysis either will be part of the health care system or they will be excluded, and medical practitioners will provide the sole insurable services. Segments of organized psychiatry propose the “remedicalization” of psychotherapy so that only the organic brain syndromes and the psychoses would be defined as insurable illnesses.
In a 1977 report to the Kaiser-Permamente Medical Center, R. Harrington suggests that persons suffering from emotional distress, including psychoneuroses and character disorders, be referred to community colleges for courses in the art of living. The American Psychiatric Association has also been at work politically on a revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases (DSM III). Although the attempt is being made to devise medically-based categories treatable only by physicians, in a recent test case in Wisconsin, a bill introduced implying that only physicians could practice “medical psychotherapy,” was not enacted.