Roughly two-thirds of Americans with a diagnosed mental health condition were unable to access treatment in 2021, though they had health insurance. And only a third of insured people who visited an emergency department or hospital during a mental health crisis, received follow-up care within a month of being discharged.
These are among the findings of a new report by the actuary firm Milliman, released Wednesday. The mental health advocacy group, Inseparable, commissioned the report and also released an accompanying brief offering policy solutions to address the gaps in mental health care.
“We kept hearing nightmare stories about Americans not getting the treatment that they needed because insurance companies were denying them care,” says Bill Smith, founder of Inseparable. “But we didn’t have enough data to show just how extensive and deep the problem was.”
Up here in my tiny corner of Canada, a 1bdrm shoebox typically costs 75% of a monthly full-time minimum wage just in rent. And that’s your gross, pre-tax wage, and not post-taxes net.
People are literally living without heat or even electricity just to put a roof over their heads. At least it’s easier in apartments, if you choose a middle unit you have warmth coming from five of six sides such that the pipes are unlikely to freeze, and the hot water is usually from central boilers.
Commensurately, vacancies have been hovering at 0.02% (2 available vacancies for every 10,000 rentals) for a good chunk of the last decade, and the homeless population (visible and working homeless) has swelled from 1.7% of the city’s population to almost 6% in less than two decades. Wal-Mart recently banned overnight stays in its parking lots for the first time since they opened shop in the 90s because they were having over a hundred vehicles there each night.
And this being Canada, we do not typically have mild winters. we usually have at least 2-3 weeks at -20℃ or lower some time January or February.
You can see how this ends up being a mental-health crisis generator on steroids.