Good Insurance Wasn’t Enough

In My husband’s suicide shows there’s something very wrong with the U.S. insurance industry, emergency physician Joy Evers writes about trying to obtain psychiatric care for her husband.

“Six days into Randy’s eight-week hospital stay, our health insurance company denied any further inpatient care.”

I have said for years that the United States severely lacks quality mental health care and needs to invest far more in making it available.

Too many people suffer without receiving the treatment they need, even when they have insurance. In this case, a psychiatrist recommended eight weeks of inpatient care for someone at very high risk. Insurance stopped paying after six days. The appeal was denied, he was discharged, and the months that followed became a cycle of outpatient programs, emergency room visits, brief admissions, and premature discharges. He later died by suicide.

Medical care should be based on what a patient needs, not how quickly an insurance company believes it can stop paying. Mental health care cannot be reduced to stabilizing someone for a few days and sending them back into the same crisis.

We need a system built to help people recover, not one that makes patients and families fight for care while they are already fighting to survive.

Read Joy Evers’s full essay, My husband’s suicide shows there’s something very wrong with the U.S. insurance industry.