We Need Mental Health Care for All
Elizabeth Warren wants to “hold insurers accountable for providing adequate mental health benefits.” We want to eliminate private insurers and provide mental health service as a right.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a Town Hall at Keene State College on September 25, 2019 in Keene, New Hampshire.Scott Eisen / Getty
Elizabeth Warren has finally released her health care plan. She calls it Medicare for All, but as Tim Higginbotham and Natalie Shure have both noted, she leaves out any number of crucial details about eliminating premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, or about providing dental, vision, hearing, and mental care.
My concern is different. The wording on Senator Warren’s website looks to me like it does answer the question of whether mental health is included — and that the answer is “no.” If this wasn’t her intention, the Warren campaign should clarify this immediately. If my reading is correct, however, this gap is a perfection illustration of why the Warren plan is inferior to that of Bernie Sanders.
Sanders vs. Warren on Mental Health
Sanders wrote a detailed damn bill that lays out the finer details of how he thinks Medicare for All should work — but you don’t need to read it to know what is says about mental health. On the second paragraph of the brief description on Sanders’s website, he talks about how we should be spending money not on insurance industry profits but on “doctors, nurses, mental health specialists, dentists, and other professionals who provide services to people and improve their lives.” He’s crystal clear on eliminating the private insurance industry from psychiatry as well as other branches of medicine.
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