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  • Boo and Vote Local!

    Boo and Vote Local!
    2024/10/21
    In case you’ve been asleep or under a rock for the past six months, we need to let you know two things: First, Kendrick won his beef with Drake, and second, there is a presidential election coming up. Like any presidential election year, everyone’s so focused on the big showdown at the top of the ticket, but that means that a lot of the local and state races, congressional races, and referenda that will make up most of your ballot are getting ignored. Just because Anderson Cooper isn’t covering your city’s mayoral contest or your state’s Railroad Commissioner race doesn’t mean those elections aren’t critically important in determining the immediate future of your community and getting important issues like healthcare on the table! So for this episode, we’re going to leave the speculation about Donald and Kamala to Anderson and take our own 360 view of why we all need to get in on the down-ballot action and how we bring healthcare justice to the forefront of our election conversations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY6SAa8LU9c Show Notes We have two guests who know their way around a Get Out the Vote Drive! Jasmine Ruddy is the Assistant Director of Campaigns for National Nurses United. She helps lead NNU's political campaigns from Medicare for All to electoral work and more! Her background is in the climate justice movement and campus/student organizing in her home state of North Carolina Jonathan Cohn is the Policy Director at Progressive Massachusetts, which does multi-issue advocacy work. Jonathan wears many hats in the political space in Massachusetts and has been active in many progressive issue and electoral campaigns over the past little over a decade. Jasmine describes the local campaign that got her hooked: as a campus organizer for climate justice she helped win ballot measures to pass a regional transit tax. It was a concrete and tangible way to make an impact on the climate justice movement. Jonathan cut his political teeth on the Obama 2012 campaign, and got the local politics bug when Boston Mayor Tom Menino retired. Twelve candidates came forward for the first open mayoral race in 20 years. He was especially interested in public school policies and funding. He volunteered for mayoral candidate and City Council Member Felix Arroyo Jr. Ben confesses that while he loves democracy, he hates elections (#relatable). But he does find more hopefulness at the local level. He also got started in a mayoral election in Boston, but the most exciting campaign he worked on was for state house. He lived in one of the most progressive districts in the state but their state representative was a powerful, well-funded right-leaning Democrat. Ben's candidate, Nika Elugardo, a true progressive beat him despite all those advantages. Picture it: New Jersey, 1990s, tween Gillian lives in a suburb (North Plainfield) seeking to change its name to distance itself from the majority Black and Brown city of Plainfield. During a town-wide debate on the ballot measure, young Gillian spoke against renaming the city. She was quoted on the front page of the local paper: "North Plainfield shouldn't change its name. Stonybrook is just a dirty brook that divides our town, just like this issue is doing right now." The anti-name change side won and our star was born. We discuss the additional influence a voter can have when working on a local election. When races can be won or lost by a few dozen votes, the candidates care a lot more about each individual. They may knock on your door or call you seeking support, which is a great opportunity to insert the issues you care about into the election. Once your candidate gets elected, they'll remember the folks who helped them get there and you'll have more influence when lobbying them on the issues you care about. (You may even end up with a job.) Jonathan's personal philosophy is "Boo and Vote." He never liked Obama's catchphrase "don't boo; v...
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    50 分
  • Medical Debt in the I.O.U.SA

    Medical Debt in the I.O.U.SA
    2024/09/30
    The United States is unique among industrialized nations. Lucky for us, we can accumulate medical debt! Most industrialized and some developing nations have national healthcare programs that guarantee care to their residents. But we in the richest nation in the world have the freedom to get insurance through the free market, and go into debt when it doesn’t cover the care we need! USA USA USA! According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), while over 90% of Americans have health insurance, we owe at least $220 billion in medical debt. Approximately 14 million people owe more than $1,000, and about 3 million owe more than $10,000. When the debt is cast more widely to those who have put medical bills on their credit cards or borrowed money to pay them, KFF found that 41% of adults have healthcare debt. According to the US Census Bureau in 2021, Black and Latinx households are disproportionately affected by medical debt. Today we’ll dive into the topic of medical debt: who has it, who profits off it, and what can we do about it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZPd1kFbEuE Show Notes What causes medical debt? Believe it or not, our freewheeling use of the healthcare system is not to blame. In the US medical debt is caused by the high prices charged by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies. While most industrialized nations have some means of controlling prices, in the United States the healthcare industry sets prices more or less however they want. As a result, according to a nationwide poll in 2022, over a five year period more than half of US adults report going into debt because of medical bills. Debt is preventing Americans from saving for retirement, paying for college, or buying a home. The 2022 poll found that 1 in 7 people reported being denied care due to unpaid bills. Two-thirds of those polled reported putting off necessary care due to cost. This is all despite the Affordable Care Act expanding insurance coverage to more Americans than ever before. Insurance companies increasingly shift costs onto patients, with higher deductibles and more claim denials. According to the 2022 KFF poll, 61% of insured Americans had medical debt in the previous five years. What makes medical debt so dangerous? We know health systems are denying care to patients who have unpaid bills. And we know people put off care so they don’t incur more debt. Those barriers to care make us sicker, and they disproportionately impact people with higher rates of chronic conditions. The Commonwealth Fund found that 54% of people with employer coverage who skipped or delayed care reported getting sicker; 61% in individual market plans and 63% with Medicare reported the same. A 2024 study published in the Journal of American Medical Association found that medical debt is associated with higher mortality and premature death. What happens when you can’t pay your medical debt? When you think about all the real people on the end of those medical debts, that makes it all the harder to swallow a fact that gets relatively little attention in the broader conversation. Medical debt collection is a for-profit business. In many cases, non-profit hospitals sell debts to for-profit medical debt collections agencies. Some health systems even operate their own for-profit debt collection arms. Think of it: They set the prices for their services as high as they want, and on the other end of the equation, they’re making money off debt collection. Dr. Luke Messac of Brigham and Women’s Hospital testified at a July hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he learned that his and many other hospitals as well as collection agencies report sick, vulnerable patients to credit bureaus, garnish wages, seize bank accounts, and seek warrants for their arrest. And again, we have to highlight the evil practice of hospital systems that restrict patients from getting n...
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    7 分
  • Episode 102: Committable

    Episode 102: Committable
    2024/08/26
    Usually on the Medicare for All Podcast, we talk about people who want healthcare but can’t get it, but today we’re talking about people getting healthcare they have specifically refused: folks who have been involuntarily committed. For plenty of our listeners, the idea of being held against your will at a psychiatric institution feels like a nightmare from another time – something out of gothic fiction or horror movies set far in the past. But for folks struggling with mental illness in 21st century America, the terrifying prospect of psychiatric commitment is alive and well. In fact, a 2020 UCLA study found that in the 25 states where they actually keep data on this, the numbers of involuntary psych detentions have been sharply rising in recent years. Today, we’re joined by two experts in this dark corner of our healthcare system to talk about why so many people are getting committed and who is reaping the benefits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjXjCSIM_2E Show Notes Originally from Massachusetts Jesse Mangan has experienced a few different psychiatric hospitalizations and has spent over two decades struggling with the impacts of those experiences, so now he produces a podcast about mental health laws called Committable. Rob Wipond is a freelance journalist who writes frequently on the interfaces between psychiatry, civil rights, policing, surveillance and privacy, and social change. His articles have been nominated for seventeen magazine and journalism awards. He is also the author of the 2023 book Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships. Jesse shares how he came to have so much (unwanted) expertise in psychiatric commitments, and how he turned that experience into a podcast, Committable. He was involuntarily committed and held longer than the standard of care dictated, past the date his insurance ran out. He was finally discharged with no real discharge plan and a big bill. Rob tells us he's been writing about mental health for a couple of decades. He says that the media typically portrays people who have been committed as really out of touch with reality, but he's found that they're far more like the rest of us. He watched his dad - who had no history of mental illness - go through a catastrophic health crisis that led to a depressive episode. Rob tells us that his dad was held and treated against his will for months. This happened in Canada where healthcare is guaranteed, so it's a more complex problem than just enacting the right financing system. A lot of people tend to think of psychiatric commitment as a barbaric tactic from the bad old days – like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – but this is obviously a practice that continues to this day. It's more common now for people to be held for a few days, rather than months or years on end. We only have data on these commitments from 25 states, but they show that these kind of commitments are rising dramatically. Jesse explains that due to disability rights activism and investigative journalism, a number of federal cases in the 1970s established some basic due process standards for patients. At the same time the mental health system became increasingly privatized and our understanding of mental health changed dramatically. The expense of due process became a factor - as soon as a case reaches a court hearing, private providers become more likely to release the patient because of cost. State mental health laws have given a lot of authority to law enforcement and providers to detain patients on an emergency basis without a due process check until the point the facility wants to hold the patient beyond the emergency period (in many states 72 hours). The justification for holding these patients are often very vague and broad, posing a risk to many Americans. Mental healthcare in this country isn't a clearly defined system.
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    44 分
  • Project 2025 Will Kill Us All

    Project 2025 Will Kill Us All
    2024/08/19
    If there’s one thing everyone is talking about these days, it’s JD Vance’s affinity for couches. But if there are two things everyone is talking about, it’s Vance’s couches and Project 2025. You may be wondering, what is this mysterious project, and what does it have to do with me? Well, it turns out, a lot! Project 2025 is the right-wing map to a terrifying future, and if its proponents have their way, the future of healthcare is especially grim. Today, we’re doing a deep dive into what this thing is and how it could change healthcare as we know it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4kYQ-Hh5pY Show Notes Gillian Mason, Healthcare-NOW's Executive Director, has read Project 2025 so you don't have to. P25 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank founded in 1973 because conservative businessmen thought Richard Nixon was too liberal (remember that Nixon created the EPA and advocated for a better national health plan than Obamacare, so they weren’t all wrong). They really hit their stride during the Reagan administration when they wrote his policy playbook, which they called the “Mandate for Leadership” — Reagan implemented or initiated about 60 percent of the 2,000 policy changes they recommended. They do this Mandate for Leadership report now every presidential cycle, and it’s been pretty influential whenever a Republican wins. These people are unabashed fascists. We use that term a lot kind of casually but these guys literally fit the Merriam-Webster Webster dictionary definition: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” The Heritage Foundation’s whole deal is consolidating all authority in the office of the president so he can implement severe economic and social regimentation based on nationalism and barely-veiled-when-it’s-not-just-blatant racism. Project 2025 It’s the “Mandate for Leadership” for this election season, so it’s supposed to be a template for Trump’s next four years. Although reading Project 2025 would make you think it was a room full of monkeys at typewriters type situation, it was actually written by a room full of Trump’s cronies. Hundreds of people contributed to writing and researching this thing, and a hefty percentage were former Trump appointees and employees of the administration. Also, VP pick JD Vance just wrote the foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the head of the P25 team. Vance has also been a mouthpiece for some of the wilder shit in P25. Trump claims he really doesn’t know much about P25. But it’s still worth talking about because COINCIDENTALLY it turns out that a lot of his policies are the same as the ones in P25. The Premise: The liberals in Washington, in cahoots with Chinese Communists and the “totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening’” have put “the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.” (This is not an exaggeration— it’s literally all on the first page) P25 has 4 main goals: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’” All the recommendations are laid out systematically according to the different areas of the federal government they want to control (The Executive Office, Department of Homeland Security, Intelligence Services, Media Agencies, etc.) We’ll mainly be focusing on healthcare today but context is important so here are a few highlights of what they’re planning to give you some flavor: Reclassify most federal employees as appointees
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    58 分
  • “Hot Virus Summer”: The Next Pandemic

    “Hot Virus Summer”: The Next Pandemic
    2024/07/15
    It’s our 100th episode folks, and we are celebrating the only way we know how – by sharing our predictions of the grim, apocalyptic future that surely awaits us if we fail to get our healthcare system together! That’s right, we’re talking about the next pandemic, and if experts are right, it’s coming sooner than we think. In addition to several somewhat less familiar pathogens on the rise this summer, COVID is back, and this time it’s FLiRTy. Today we’ll go into some of the outbreaks currently threatening to explode into our next global disaster and explore how prepared our for-profit healthcare system is to keep us safe. Spoiler: It isn’t. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErXbxe4U-QQ Show Notes This emerging new pandemic situation is pretty serious, and more people should be taking it seriously. Forbes healthcare reporter Alex Knapp called this: “Hot Virus Summer.” First, COVID is up! Again! It’s important to point out that COVID never really left – in 2023 75,000 people died from COVID 19, nearly 1 million were hospitalized, and plenty of people are still suffering from Long COVID. Now we have the new FLiRT variants — sexy! There are almost 34,000 new cases per week globally. Next up: Bird Flu, which has historically tended to infect birds, is evolving and has begun to infect mammals. For now, that mostly means livestock – so far 129 dairy herds in 12 US states. As far as animals are concerned this is already a pandemic – it’s impacting industries all over the world and could cause shortages of meat and dairy. You may be panicking: IS OUR CHEESE SAFE? Don’t worry, most commercially available dairy products are pasteurized, which kills the virus. There have, however, been three cases of the virus in humans reported in the US. Around the world, more than 50% of people infected with Bird Flu die from the virus. All three of those people in the US worked on farms in direct contact with birds and livestock, and right now the CDC is just limiting their warnings about Bird Flu to folks who also work in close contact with animals. BUT, scientists are warning that at any time the virus could mutate and become transmissible between humans, at which point, we would be facing epic disaster. How likely is that to happen? In August 2023, Dr. Michael Greger said of Bird Flu, "The question is not if, but when.” In addition to COVID and Bird Flu, Mpox (fka Monkey Pox) is having another moment, as is West Nile Virus, so there are a lot of ingredients in the virus stew we’re cooking. So the best indicator of future outcomes is to look at how we’ve fared in similar situations in the past. Luckily (or not), the 2020 COVID outbreak is still fresh in some of our minds. You may remember that we, as a country, were not particularly well-prepared. For one, our profit-driven healthcare system creates disparities of access and care, which were exacerbated by the pandemic. Also, we don’t have a truly cohesive public health program in this country. Health departments in various counties, municipalities, and states work largely independently of each other, so there was little to no coordination on surveillance and testing. We had to rely on private companies for important preventative measures like PPE and, most notably, vaccines (the research and development for which were PUBLICLY FUNDED with our tax dollars.) During pandemics, a lot of people stopped going to healthcare facilities for elective procedures and surgeries - the real moneymakers for the for-profit healthcare system. That led to layoffs of staff at the same time that patients who desperately needed care struggled to get it. In countries with a national health system, hospitals don’t lose money if people stop going; they have a fixed amount to cover the operating expenses based on past history. So you don’t see mass layoffs and shrinking of the healthcare workforce when they are most needed. So if we were to do the whole pandemic over again...
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    38 分
  • The View from Capitol Hill: A Very Special Conference Episode

    The View from Capitol Hill: A Very Special Conference Episode
    2024/06/17
    It's the most wonderful time of the year! For activists in the movement to make Medicare for All a reality, this is the week when we gather to plot, scheme, and kvetch. Welcome to the 2024 Annual Medicare for All Strategy Conference, “Healthcare Beyond the Ballot Box,” organized by Healthcare NOW! For those of you who are attending the conference right now, you are getting a sneak preview of our Very Special Conference Episode! Since our theme this year is about what happens to Medicare for All in an election year — and beyond — we wanted to invite some of our favorite policy people with their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in DC to help us sort out what’s happening with healthcare on Capitol Hill and what role we can play to get some justice out of DC in the coming year! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n36v0eTV1a8&t=1167s powerpress Our guests are Eagan Kemp and Alex Lawson. Eagan Kemp is the health care policy advocate for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. He is an expert in health care policy and served as a senior analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office prior to coming to Public Citizen. Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition— a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans. Show Notes With one of our major candidates being a guy who is solidly against Medicare for All and the other being Trump, is 2024 a bad federal election cycle, or the worst federal election of our lifetime, and why? Alex puts a positive spin on it: we are closer to M4A with a Biden presidency than any other Democratic presidency. He's definitely not a M4A guy, but all his other economic policies are based on Sanders-esque populism, rather than Obama-esque neo-liberalism. We've seen Biden enact serious corporate reform in several sectors, and in a second Biden administration, taking on corporate greed and sociopathy in health insurance is on the agenda. On the other hand, we know exactly what's at stake with another Trump presidency, driven entirely by profit for his billionaire friends. Eagan notes that there has been movement on Medicare in recent years, including die-hard GOPs shying away from talking about cuts to Medicare until after the election. At the same time, we're seeing Biden moving more toward the M4A movement and the folks trying to expand and improve traditional Medicare. We're seeing insurance companies running scared, feeling the pressure from our movement in a way they haven't before. Alex notes that Biden's economic vision contains a lot that Medicare for All folks can work with. Our movement worked hard to expand Medicare to include vision, hearing, and dental, which was ultimately included in Biden's Build Back Better plan. We didn't get that, but we did get prescription drug negotiations, which is a huge part of improving Medicare before we expand it to everyone. (Go back and listen to another episode where we were joined by Alex to discuss prescription drug negotiations for more details.) We've also seen a lot of good work against Medicare privatization, via Medicare Advantage, and that solidarity has moved the ball a lot - more than ever before to restrain private insurance companies. We didn't just give up when we knew Biden wouldn't sign M4A; we pivoted to expanding benefits and reversing the privatization with a lot of success. Eagan found a silver lining in - of all places - the subject of private equity in healthcare. He thinks we've passed the peak of PE ravaging healthcare, and they are now backing off the healthcare sector in part because of increased pressure from the DOJ, FTC and HHS. That's due to pressure from doctors, patients, and whistleblowers. Eagan also notes that the Trump administration pilot of throwing seniors in traditional Medicare into private relationships with providers.
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    1分未満
  • Dude, Where’s My Union Health Plan?

    Dude, Where’s My Union Health Plan?
    2024/05/06
    We are in the middle of a resurgence of organized labor in the US. From Amazon workers to auto workers and grad students to baristas at Starbucks, everyone is getting in on the action! One of the big reasons workers are so hot to get that union card is because of… you guessed it, healthcare! Today we’re going to be talking union healthcare plans – how they work and how workers have managed to use collective bargaining to resist the national erosion of healthcare access. Most importantly, we’re going to take a deep dive into why, even with better healthcare, unions have been leaders in the fight for Medicare for All, and how they might save the rest of us from corporate healthcare hell. Our guest Jim McGee has spent his entire career working in union health benefits, starting with the Plumbers and Pipefitters local he belonged to in Harrisburg Pennsylvania. For the past 20 years, he has been the administrator of the health benefits plan for Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689. He’s on the steering committee for the labor campaign for single payer healthcare, and he’s joining us today from Bethesda, MD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNFBkHBrpUY Show Notes Jim educates us on the two types of union health plans: Unionized workers with a single employer (think nurses or teachers) earn employer-sponsored health benefits much like unorganized workplaces, but the cost and benefit sets of those plans can be negotiated if the workforce is unionized. Taft-Hartley plans are multiemployer plans that are jointly managed by multiple companies and the union within the same industry. The workers pay while they're working to have health insurance when they're not. Taft Hartleys exist in industries where there's a lot of turnover, like the building trades. A worker may have many different employers and many periods of unemployment over their careers. Typically both those options sound a lot better than what your average non-union worker is getting from their employer, though they are still subject to same rising costs and economic pressures as every other health insurance plan. Given that union members are more likely to have health coverage than non-union workers, it’s interesting that unions have been at the forefront of the movement for Medicare for all. Many unions come from a rich progressive tradition that looks past the short term to the long term value of guaranteed healthcare for all workers. Jim also shares that the unions that are more exposed to competitive pressure in their environment are more likely to be supportive of Medicare for All. This is especially evident in less urban areas where locals are facing more non-union competition. Jim notes that throughout his career, healthcare has been #1 cause of strikes. Taking it off the table would not only benefit the workers, it would benefit their entire community. Small businesses and non-union employers that offer poorer or no healthcare benefits to their employees often stay afloat on the backs of the unionized employers in their community that do offer good health benefits; this is an inquitable and unsustainable system. Speaking of strikes, graduate student workers at Boston University are on strike right now over healthcare benefits among other things. Not only would Medicare for All take health insurance off the negotiating table (making more room for workers to bargain for pay, safety and other benefits), it would take away a the ability of employers to weaponize health insurance to break strikes; solidarity can crumble quickly when the employer stops paying those premiums at the first of the month. Follow and Support the Pod! Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.
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    43 分
  • Mental Health & For-Profit Insurance: A Deadly Combo

    Mental Health & For-Profit Insurance: A Deadly Combo
    2024/04/07
    The U.S. is wrestling with a massive mental health crisis - impacting young people in particular. Half of young adults and one-third of all adults report that they always feel anxious or have often felt anxiety in the past year. One-third of respondents could not get the mental health services they needed. Why? 80% say they couldn’t afford the cost and more than 60% said that shame and stigma kept them away. The shortage of mental health providers also means that care can be very hard to find, even when we try hard to find it. Usually on the Medicare for All Podcast, we focus on the stories we think you need to know about. Today we decided to scrap the show and come up with a plan to get an hour of free therapy!* (*Not really. None of this information is intended as medical advice.) Our guests today are Dr. Pamela Fullerton and Lindsay Baish. Lindsay is a therapist and an Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Illinois and a certified trauma professional – and former volunteer for the podcast. Dr. Pamela Fullerton, Ph.D., is the founder and clinical director of Advocacy & Education Consulting, a counseling and consulting organization dedicated to ensuring social justice and advocacy through equitable access to mental health and well-being services. She is a Latina bilingual Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP), a Certified Dialectical Behavior Therapy professional (C-DBT), a Certified Clinical Anxiety Treatment Professional (CCATP), a Certified Grief Informed Professional (CGP), and a clinical supervisor and consultant specializing in working with BIPOC communities, undocumented communities, immigration and acculturation, trauma, anxiety, life transitions, and career counseling. In addition to being a professional writer and speaker, Dr. Fullerton is an adjunct instructor in the Counselor Education department at Northeastern Illinois University. She is also a volunteer contributing writer for three publications and runs a nonprofit to support Latinx youth in the Chicagoland area. Dr. Fullerton consults for two behavioral health advisory boards, Sinai Urban Health Institute (SUHI) and Illinois Unidos/Latino Policy Forum, providing advice and input to assist in promoting health equity and justice initiatives for underserved communities in Illinois. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGql7_NXhts Show Notes Pam tells us that counselling is a subset of psychiatry and psychology that started as a movement for career development for veterans returning from war. The profession started helping people through life transitions puts people and their lives and livelihoods at the center. Lindsay notes that a lot of the language of mental healthcare is used interchangeably, but there are distinctions: psychologists have PhDs and can provide therapists; psychiatrists have MDs and can prescribe medications. Counselors and therapists can diagnose but not prescribe. Congress passed the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act in 2008 to prevent insurers from providing worse coverage for mental health than they do for medical or surgical treatment. However, mental health providers are not usually treated the same as medical doctors when it comes to insurance coverage and payments. Historically, counselors are the newest mental health clinicians on the scene and are more limited by insurers than more established clinicians like social workers or psychologists. Insurers often only reimburse for certain therapeutic models of care (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, for example) leaving other kinds of counseling uncovered in the midst of a crisis in mental healthcare. Pam tells us that a big part of her job is the extra work to navigate her patients' insurance plans, Medicare and Medicaid in order to get coverage for their care. Most Americans can't afford to pay out of pocket for mental healthcare. Counselors just got approved for Medicare reimbursement on January 1, 2024,
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    59 分