All In One Boat

This front page article on Medicare Advantage insurers scaring and scamming the elderly and then billing Medicare for nice profits certainly caught my attention this morning. I am in the age bracket to be getting their calls any minute. I’ve got my dis-list at the ready…

Here’s a good setup from Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly and a link to the Times article.

As part of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, Republicans expanded the Medicare+Choice program into something called Medicare Advantage. This was all part of an effort to get the free market involved in Medicare, but since it turned out the free market wasn’t very interested, Republicans did what they usually do in such circumstances: they turned on the corporate welfare spigot. In this case, it took the form of bribing insurance companies to participate by paying them more for the same services than Medicare pays directly to doctors under traditional Medicare. The New York Times reports:

If there were ribbons for courage under fire in the unarmed world Alsion Malmon would get one. When her older brother, Brian, committed suicide she mourned him and then began to ask herself: how is it I didn’t know what he was dealing with? What can I do to change the silence he lived in until he could bear it no more? With a house meeting of three people she began a campaign to lift the stigma about mental illness.

“There’s so much talk about sexual identity and racial relations on college campuses. It was ridiculous in my mind that mental health wasn’t right up there with them, since it’s an issue that touches so many people.”

The prevalence of mental illness on campus is stunning, she found when she began researching the topic: Suicide is the second leading cause among death for college students. Almost one in 10 college students has made a suicide plan. Nearly half of all students report having felt so depressed that they could not function in the previous year. Most people with schizophrenia develop the disease before they are 25.

And yet, Ms. Malmon said, mental illness like her brother’s is so stigmatized that it is often kept secret.

“Mental illness is such an isolating thing,” she said. “It’s not something that’s easy to tell your family and friends about. That is the impetus for this. I firmly believe that Brian took his life because he didn’t know how to live with mental illness. It’s terrifying, because there aren’t positive role models, there’s just the people you see on the streets.”

Alison Malmon: Hero

My hope is that her group, Active Minds, doesn’t limit its concern to adolescent onset scizhophrenia, or depression but understands the need to provide places and treatment options for all sorts of mental illness, from pedophilia, to gun rage, to animal torture. With no where to turn people will turn bad.

If you want to help her, or want to start a local chapter here is the place to start: ActiveMindsOnCampus.org