Tom Reed
Congressman Tom Reed said silos in substance abuse and mental health care need to be bridged.
Reed, in his weekly media call, said the Ways and Means Committee heard from a panel on Wednesday about how the Pandemic has exacerbated the crisis in regards to substance abuse and mental health in America.
He said he asked the panel why in healthcare, substance abuse providers and mental health providers are essentially “silo-ed” and end up working against each other, “And one of the things that I heard through today is that we need to focus on training in our educational systems for medical students to bridge that silo. So that mental health and substance abuse that always, in my opinion, go hand in hand or often go hand in hand, are not treated as different illnesses but as related illnesses.”
Reed said one of the things Congress could do to help is to ask the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services to look at the coding and financial incentive that make it a disincentive, “To treat both issues of substance abuse and mental health issues as one, or related, type of situation that a patient is dealing with.”
Reed said he’ll be encouraging the coding be changed in order to get rid of the financial disincentive to treat both mental health and substance abuse issues.
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