RHCD Georgia Press Release

RHCD in Georgia - A Call to Action

For Additional Information, Contact: Nick Hume, PhD., (770) 977-2987

Rescue Health Care Day April 1, 2000

The Georgia Mental Health Coalition on Managed Care is supporting National Rescue Health Care Day on April 1, 2000. The Coalition is an interdisciplinary consortium of licensed mental health professionals with representatives from advanced practice nurses, clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists and the National Mental Health Association of Georgia. This event is being coordinated by The National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers. The purpose of this national public relations effort is to raise consumer awareness across the country.

"As managed care assumes a larger and larger role in the provision of mental health services, consumers are experiencing the major limits and restrictions managed care policies often place on payment for treatment," stated Nick Hume, Ph.D., Atlanta, psychologist. "The reality of these limits confronts consumers with economic and ethical issues that mental health providers have been aware of and warned about for some time."At the state level, the Georgia Mental Health Coalition on Managed Care, will present Governor Roy Barnes with an award for his ongoing support of Georgia citizens through sponsorship of major legislation enforcing controls on insurance companies. These controls ensure that Georgia citizens receive appropriate mental health care.

All across the United States, citizens are finding the managed health care system cumbersome, restrictive, often harmful, and occasionally deadly. Many well-trained, ethical, caring clinicians are demoralized under a system that too often prevents them from doing quality work or from referring patients to specialists. Many now believe that because of managed care's basic principles and structure, regulation will not be enough to make it a pro-quality, pro-consumer system and we need to explore alternatives to managed care. Americans never voted to allow corporations interested in protecting executive income and corporate profit to choose clinicians and treatments for them and their families.

On Rescue Health Care Day, Americans can join hands to proclaim their vote of "No Confidence" in corporate health care and participate in a national dialogue on alternative systems of health insurance. It's time to put health care back in the hands of patients and licensed professionals.