Professor Thomas Szasz on Mental Health Parity & Insurance

  • “We are talking about a situation where the government is mandating that an ostensibly private insurance company provide coverage for a disease which doesn’t exist.”
  • “NAMI represents the interests of mental patients the same way that the Ku Klux Klan represented the interests of black Americans.”
  • “Advocating ‘parity for mental illness’ is a hoax. The supporters of ‘mental health parity’ do not want parity for mental patients: They do not seek equal ‘legal treatment’ by legislators and courts for mental patients and medical patients. What they want is parity for psychiatrists: They seek equal ‘monetary treatment’ by health insurance companies for psychiatrists and other physicians.”
  • Insurance companies are no longer “free agents,” state laws requiring them to “cover treatments for fictitious ailments…. Thus, employer, employee, insurance carrier, and private mental hospital are locked in an economic embrace that corrupts them all and that has encouraged an absurd growth of private psychiatric inpatient services.”
  • “We are talking about a situation where the government is mandating that an ostensibly private insurance company provide coverage for a disease which doesn’t exist. There is so much to say about it, I don’t know where to begin. The people who clamor for this—mainly politicians and psychiatrists—want parity for mental illness, but they don’t want parity for the mental patient, because ordinary patients can reject treatment. They don’t mean therapy; they mean getting a foot in the door for involuntarily treating people and having these huge bowls of money going into psychiatry and psychiatric drugs. Again, cui bono: Who profits from this? It finally came out that Eli Lilly is a big donor to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and they have millions of dollars to propagandize their views. The critics don’t have any money to propagandize their views. This is a completely one-sided, government-sponsored movement.”

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