> It sounds like there’s a financial incentive for therapists to diagnose patients with conditions they may or may not have…big yikes
I think you might be thinking about this the wrong way. It's not like therapists want to diagnose people with conditions to scam them out of money (which I suspect might be what you're thinking), it's that insurance companies require there to be some specific mental health issue to be willing to cover therapy, so therapists have to come up with some acceptable reason to give to the insurance company.
Insurance companies may accept "adjustment disorder" (which is just basically having trouble adjusting to a life change) for a certain amount of time, but will often want something else eventually, which can just be something like depression or anxiety.
In some sense this means that therapists technically have to "diagnose" something (as in write it down as a possible diagnosis) to bill insurance but usually people are having some sort of issue if they are seeking therapy so it's probably often just a matter of determining what fits.
Arguably maybe it would be better for insurance to cover therapy even without a specific diagnosis, but in any case, having to write down "depression" or something on a form for the insurance company doesn't mean that they're necessarily telling everyone that they have some sort of serious mental condition or need to get on psychotropic drugs (not that therapists who aren't psychiatrists can prescribe those anyway).
Therapists aren't running around diagnosing people who aren't interested in therapy with bipolar or something to get them to hand over their money or to scam insurance companies.
Psychiatrists / neurologists do the diagnosis. I'm not sure about a financial incentive, or at least in Kaiser's case. It would mean they'd have to cover that person's therapy possibly indefinitely which isn't much of an incentive.
They're more incentivized to not diagnose with a condition.
I was considered not bi-polar and do not have ADHD by a psychiatrist and thus I couldn't get therapy covered.
There’s an even deeper problem, which is that insurance as a system simply doesn’t make sense for things that are not rare or that affect a sizable fraction of population
If it’s that common, then there’s no need for a large bureaucracy of actuaries, accountants, agents, etc…, in the middle or to serve as your intermediaries.
And a single paperwork error every five years, causing you to spend a few hours sorting it out, would more than outweigh all the tiny advantages that might theoretically benefit the customer.
As with any for-profit business, benefit to the customer is not a goal in and of itself, but rather an incidental side-effect of obtaining money from the customer, in that it is how the customer is convinced to give up their money.
I would caution against assuming systems such as what you described are intended to help the customer. It sounds like instead, it is intended to help the company, by causing you to have to spend your (not their) time and potentially miss an appointment, saving the insurance company money.
After all, what are you going to do, leave your employer for another one with a different insurance company over an insurance paperwork headache?
