Crooked Beginnings
The 1980s was an explosive period of financial growth for the psychiatric hospital industry. And with that growth typically came increases in abuse and illegalities. In Texas, for example, it was found that counselors, telephone hot lines and other community programs were established by psychiatric hospitals. Their purpose was to ascertain a person’s level of medical insurance coverage, and then to dupe them into treatment programs, with no regard to what their actual needs may be. But as private health insurance companies started to notice the ever-growing psychiatric billings, they started restricting the number of days for which they would cover such treatment. After all, at $30,000 per month per patient on the average, it was becoming extremely costly to health care providers. With profit-pressure on them, and U.S. insurance providers catching on, the psychiatric facilities expanded their zone of influence north of the border to Canada, which they found to be a lucrative market, ripe with patients with plenty of government-funded health coverage. According to the former executive director of OHIP, Robert MacMillan, American psychiatric hospitals collected more than $160 million from the Ontario government between 1987 and 1991 for substance abuse claims alone. This does not include all the other billing diagnostic categories such as schizophrenia and major depression, and an entire host of other psychiatric diagnoses (there are hundreds). All of these could be billed for, as long as it was covered by OHIP.
The $400 Million Swindle continued...
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