What to know about the status of mental health care + health insurance

If you've been following the news, you might know that the Big Beautiful Bill has passed. What does this mean? There's a lot of potential chances expected in the next year. Everything predicted in the beginning of the year has come to fruition. This is a time of high anxiety for many of us.

The implications of this bill are really scary for our field. So I'm here to break down what to expect and what we are trying to do in response. Please see these resources we designed for your own protection and the protection of your family.

• Medicaid is going to collapse in the next few years.

  1. It was a plan, and remains a plan, to destroy public insurance from Project 2025. The cuts that have been proposed - 1 trillion over 10 years, will do more than just kick people off insurance.. People will lose jobs. People will die. People will lose access to mental health care. And because of that, crime will increase. People will not be able to work because they won't be able to afford their mental health medications -- and won't be able to then stay stable.

  2. Hospitals, community mental health centers and other small practices and clinics depend on Medicaid funding. There's a lot of complexities including the provider tax being deemed illegal and reduced grant funding that mean that hospitals are inevitably going to lose. Hospitals will try to push these expenses toward commercial insurance companies to make up the difference.

Commercial insurance companies are going to respond by increasing your premiums. Plans are going to cover less. Mental health parity is expected to be gone -- meaning that insurance companies are very likely going to stop offering mental health benefits. Right now, there is a "parity" law which means that mental health conditions to be covered as equally as physical health conditions.

They are also going to pay providers poorly. BCBS and Aetna have already released our contracted rates for the next year and both have dropped significantly. It isn't just for us -- it's every therapist and psychiatric practice in the state. This has a massive impact on small practices.. for us, we will lose anticipated hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be used to pay our support staff, our providers and keep us afloat. For many therapists, family practices and psychiatric practices, they will have to make an unfortunate choice to completely stop taking insurance or to raise prices in order to survive the next few years.

We have tried to negotiate with them, and have been told it's not happening. Trump's policies have protected commercial insurances by allowing them to increase their profits by charging you more, and paying us less.

Pharmaceuticals/medications are expected to be more expensive. The majority of generic medications are made abroad, and with tariffs on those medications, pharmacies will need to raise the prices. IBig Pharma are also in this together with commercial insurance companies - they know insurance companies are going to pay less for medications while they simultaneously raise their prices. This means you pay more, insurance companies keep more of their money, and Big Pharma rakes in extra.

Education has already had steps to privatize and lose funding from the government. The state will have to further reduce their budget toward education to make up the lost funding to the medical system. That means the kids with disabilities, IEPs, and 504s will inevitably suffer in a system that is already broken.

The affordable care act has made changes that have dropped the enrollment period for marketplace insurance for special times (marriage, child, divorce), adding extra verification steps to make things harder and delaying or reducing subsidies. If you received a subsidy for the marketplace insurance because you met income criteria...but received a raise or worked overtime pushing you even a dollar over the income limit, you will need to pay that entire subsidy back. Which could be a lot.

ICE will have the most funding they've ever had. They have now been granted access to schools, churches and safe havens. They will have more money than the military. They are taking people regardless of citizenship at this point, and human rights abuses are already being documented at these facilities. Check those resources linked in the beginning of this article.

What is our response?

We will be planning some fundraising options and potentially raising money to make a "community fund" to help people make up those costs they won't be able to afford -- maybe their medication, maybe a few therapy sessions a month, medication visits, etc.. Priority would be to undocumented folks, very low income, etc. and would have an application process. We will ideally launch this in the next few months. And there are plenty of therapy and psychiatric practices who are aligned with us to make sure we can continue offering our help no matter what. <3