Hypnosis and National Health Care

[Laura E. Mirian]

With the focus now on nationalizing health care how do you think hypnotherapy will be affected. Will we be included as professionals who are eligible for payment? Is there going to be a voice for inclusion in the plan? What are your thoughts?

[Kathleen Hanover]

Hi Laura,

If you really want to work for the government, perhaps you could go get a job at the Post Office or the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and see how you like it. :)

I sincerely hope that the U.S. never goes the way of the UK or Canada in terms of nationalizing health care. The end result is lower life expectancy, rationing, and long waits for even the simplest of procedures. If I remember correctly, Hillary Clinton's plan would have put folks like you in jail for daring to treat someone for cash outside the system. I don't know if Obama has the same idea or not.

I remember the last time I went on a trip to the Stratford Festival up in Ontario. The residents of Stratford rent out rooms to tourists during Festival season, and the woman I was staying with had to get around with a cane. I thought it was because of the huge scar she had encircling one knee. "Oh no," she said. "I got that knee done last year. I'm still on the waiting list to get the other one done." That's right...over two years' wait to get a knee replacement. But it was "free" (except for the insanely high taxes, of course.) So she had to walk with a cane for five years...who cares, she was old!

Right now in Canada there are 875,000 people on waiting lists for medical procedures, in a country with a population 1/10th our size. The problem is so bad that alternatives have sprung up, like this one: Timely Medical Alternatives (Under Hillary's plan, this would have been illegal.)

So if you're in Canada, and find a suspicious lump in your breast, good luck with that. You'll wait 4 MONTHS for an ultrasound. Need an MRI? You'll wait up to six months. Need a cardiac bypass? You'll wait up to a YEAR, if you live long enough, and if you're not too old (under nationalized medicine, the elderly get the worst care if they can get it at all.)

Both my parents would be dead now if they had to wait for the kind of care they got immediately here in the U.S.

Government health care? Brought to us by the same people who run the VA hospitals and Medicare? No thanks.

[Henxy]

Boo to your derision of the UK's NHS!

It's real peace of mind to know that whatever the cause of your illness, however irresponsible you've been, the NHS will provide life-saving care without regard for the cost to the NHS, and without emptying your wallet before deciding whether your life is worth saving. And waiting lists have reduced dramatically, too.

If you want insurance-based private medicine, it's available too, and you can buy your way to health (assuming the private sector has invested in providing their staff with the skills and equipment that the NHS has bought).

[Kathleen Hanover]

It would appear that "universal health care" is neither universal, nor very caring.

NHS kidney cancer patients denied life-saving drug because it's 'to...
With privately bought drugs proving to be up to five times as effec...
Cancer patients denied best treatments
One in four NHS patients denied latest cancer drugs
Cancer sufferer killed himself the day after NHS denied new drug

[Richard Nongard - HypnosisGurus.com]

Not a chance of being included unless licensed as a mental health professional in a nationalized healthcare system. Limiting providers is a way they percieve to limit costs. In addition, the APA for the first time in the DSM-5 (out in 2011) will specify outcome based treatments for various mental health disorders (and of course the expanding bellcurve makes normal human conditions patholoical and subjects them to DSM assessment - like nicotine dependency) and my guess is that the outcome of this will be that anyone who deviates from the recomended treatment modalty (even if something is more effective, new since publication, or uniquely beneficial to a client) will be denied by "managed care" regardless of the gatekeeper being the government or private insurers.

A different debate: Does it really matter? I am eligible to take insurance, but do not do so, becasue people are willing to pay for wellness and many of the behaviorsl changes hypnosis is usful in helping, I make more money in an all cash practice with little hassle, and outcomes are better.

[Michael Ellner]

I agree with Richard -- No chance!

On the other hand, I wonder if cash will be an option in the "Brave New World"

I fear that anything less than a world wide social chain reaction rejecting the tyranny of the DSM and a mass movement demanding that any socialized medical plan must include certified alternative health care practitioners, who are non-licensed health care professionals - it will be the end of the world as we know it....

I would expect that public health experts and major media would quickly manufacture the belief that people who go outside of the Universal Health Care program weaken the program-- Every one must use the approved services to make it work -- Blah, blah, blah...

Now what?

[Rick Collingwood]

I agree with you Henxy on the benefits of a national system. We have a similiar system in Australia, and at least an ambulance won't drive past you and you won't wait a day in an endless line, or be thrown out of a hospital too early. And if you want to pay for private hospital cover you can always do that. having people on a waiting list is a much better option than no option at all. I met a guy from Las Vegas when I was in the US last year and the cost he was paying for he and his wifes basic health care was absolutely rediculous.

[Don Gibbons, Ph.D.]

Many people still seem to be hypnotized by the "Harry and Louise" propaganda of the insurance companies. Using no less than the United Nations World Health Organization as a source of my statistics, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the United States does NOT lead the world in life expectancy and does NOT lead the world in the quality of healthcare provided to its citizens -- far from it!

Of course you can find horror stories about healthcare in other countries. But what about all the horror stories that you hear on the news every day about American healthcare, or the lack thereof? With thirty-seven million Americans without any kind of health insurance at all, what kind of a "developed country" are we?

I'll tell you what kind. I'm seventy-two years old, and working my derriere off in the New Jersey State Prison system so that my wife and I (who is nineteen years younger than I am and doesn't qualify for Medicare because she hasn't worked enough quarters) can pay the $150,000 it costs to have her pacemaker replaced every five to seven years, (Well, that's what it cost us five years ago.) Would this happen if we were living in England, Canada, France, or Spain, or any one of dozens of other countries? No way, Jose! And I'm going to have to keep it up until I'm eighty-five.

What if something like this were to happen to you or to your own family? Or even worse, what if you could no longer earn a living and had to join the human trash-heap of the uninsured yourself? Be afraid. Be very afraid!.

According to Physicians for a National Health Plan, the fastest-growing healthcare organization in the United States, the solution is a single-payer insurance system which will cover everyone in much the same way that Medicare does today. Eventually, with the coming recognition of hypnosis as a profession in its own right, hypnotists could expect to be reimbursed in much the same way as psychologists and social workers. (I can't remember the exact numbers from PNHP, but as it stands now something like thirty-three cents out of every insurance dollar goes for administrative expenses, and about seven cents out of every Medicare dollar does. And Medicare doesn't spend their administrative expenses to pay million-dollar salaries and bonuses to a bunch of fat-ass executives and C.E.O.s, and to hire a bunch of sharp-eyed, sharp-penciled sociopaths whose sole reason for their job is to deny as many claims as possible. And of course, there's all that public-relations advertising to consider, which is getting more and more expensive all the time as the facts pile up.)

Any more colleagues from outside the U.S. care to weigh in on this discussion? Do you think that the citizens of your own country would ever vote to adopt our "system ?"

[Don Gibbons, Ph.D.]

Richard,

I have a small practice on the side in clinical psychology and like many others I tried to go insurance-free. But people just don't have the money nowadays to pay full fare when they can find somebody in their insurance network who will take their $30 co-pay. There are always a few people who work without taking insurance, but I personally believe that this is because of their personal charisma, since most of us simply are not able to do it no matter how hard we try.

My personal physician is an excellent doctor, and my wife and I have been with him for many years. He doesn't like to take insurance. His waiting room usually has plenty of available chairs, and you can get right in for an appointment as a result. He rakes his own yard ("to save money," he says), and is always telling me about how expensive it is to put a kid through college nowadays. And as far as charisma is concerned, he'd make a lousy hypnotist!

But insurance is not the answer either. (See below.)

Don

[Kathleen Hanover]

I'm from inside the U.S. and I pay $165 a month for health insurance (including prescription drug coverage and dental!) So, doing a little math, anyone who smokes a carton of cigarettes a week has enough disposable income to buy an individual health insurance policy. (Anyone who doesn't have $165 a month in disposable income probably qualifies for Medicaid.)

And I think it's interesting how many people from other countries come here for their healthcare. If the U.S. healthcare system is nationalized, where will the Canadians go? My folks live in Florida during the winter and many of their neighbors are Canadian snowbirds who get all their heathcare procedures when they're in the U.S. because they can't get them in a timely manner at home.

And another thing...under a nationalized healthcare system, the government owns your labor if you have a healthcare skill. The government would decide where and when you work, and for how much, and under what working conditions. I personally don't feel entitled to my doctor's life. She's a great person and I've been going to her for years (insurance or no insurance.) I know she spent 12 years +/- in college. I know she sacrificed a lot to earn the skills that she has. I don't feel that she "belongs" to me or that I have the right to demand that she work for me (which is essentially what happens when an industry is nationalized and its workers become government property). I think owning someone else's life/labor is immoral.

[Laura E. Mirian]

Hi Kathleen,

I did not see where I stated I wanted to work for the goverrment. I was asking if there is nationalized health care would hypnotherapist be included in those who would receive payment or not. I have two friends in Germany who left the US to practice there because the German government includes their energy healing practice in their healthcare benefits. Here in the US they had to rely on cash payments and found it difficult to practice full time. I work full-time in another industry and would love to practice full time but I need my 'day job' to pay the bills.

[Laura E. Mirian]

Hi Richard,

Good to hear that you have been sucessful in practicing full time without insurance. I feel encouraged.

[Laura E. Mirian]

Hi Don,

I have family in France and their perception of the current economic crisis is that no matter how bad things get, they don't have to worry about getting sick.