Image: Jesse Zhang for NPR and KHN
Author: To read Yuki Noguchi's article, please click here.
Untold numbers of families like Rachel's are dealing with myriad challenges finding and paying for mental health care, and then ending up in debt. There are too few therapists and psychologists in the U.S. — and fewer still who provide treatment paid for by insurance. That compounds the financial toll on families.
Tabulating the impact isn't easy. Many do what Rachel did: They refinance their house, drain college savings or borrow from family. But that kind of borrowing often isn't included in estimates of medical debt. As a result, it's been hard to know how much families are paying out of their pockets for mental health treatment.
A recent KFF poll designed to measure the many ways people borrow to pay medical bills found that about 100 million Americans currently have some kind of health care debt, and 20% of those owe money for mental health services.
Those who can't afford to borrow sometimes try to get coverage for their children under public insurance like Medicaid, which sometimes means reducing their income to qualify.
Lack of data keeps struggling families in the shadows
"We don't have real data," says Patrick Kennedy, a former U.S. congressman and founder of the Kennedy Forum, a mental health advocacy group. Across the board, he says, there's a lamentable lack of data when it comes to mental illness. "We don't track this, we have a hodge-podge of reporting that's not standardized."
That lack of data keeps many people in the shadows, Kennedy says. It makes it hard to hold insurers accountable for any legal obligations they have to pay for mental health care, or to argue for specific policy changes from regulators that oversee them. Kennedy says that problem should not fall on the shoulders of the many families who are too busy fighting to survive.
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