Although psychiatry is the smallest faction within the health care industry, authorities have estimated that psychiatric fraud accounts for 20 percent of fraudulent health care claims paid annually. This places the annual cost of psychiatric fraud in the tens of billions, ranging up to $40 billion per year, as described at the start of this article.
Investigators routinely find psychiatrists responsible for a disproportionate share of the fraud and corruption within the health care industry.
As far back as 1985, a U.S. Justice Department probe found that while psychiatrists represented only 8 percent of the physicians in the country, they accounted for 18 percent of the crooked doctors suspended from Medicaid programs over a 15-year period -- the worst performance of any group in the medical field.
Crimes included charging for therapy when they had only doled out drugs; billing for patients who did not exist; falsely billing for up to 24 hours of therapy per day; and having sex with patients and billing the government for their lust.
Florida Medicare investigators found that 40 percent of all mental health outpatient service billings in 1994 were fraudulent.
And if fines collected by the federal government are an index, psychiatry is responsible for nearly 90 percent of the health care fraud in the United States. Of the $411 million paid in health-care-related fines in 1994, $379 million were paid by psychiatric hospitals.
Much of psychiatry's cost to the taxpayer is hidden. The state budget of Colorado for 1995 allocated approximately $111 million dollars for mental health. However, when the costs of psychiatric programs tucked away inside the Education, Justice and other state departments were examined, that figure nearly tripled.
Much of the money for such programs is simply wasted. In 1990, for example, the U.S. House of Representatives' Human Resources Subcommittee reported that up to $100 million in federal mental health funds had been illegally diverted. The subcommittee also indicated that while the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) knew about it, it was lax in doing anything.
NIMH's squandering of research dollars drew national media attention in 1995. "Research" NIMH funded, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, included:
• a study of tree frogs to allegedly determine the development of speech in humans;
• a 5-year study of the hormonal mechanisms in the brains of rats which make them want to eat salt;
• a 17-year study of slang terms used under stress by members of an ethnic minority in New York City; and
• a 31-year study of rhesus monkeys' reactions to torture while on mind-altering drugs
*You will note that many of the videos in the last linked post are no longer available on YouTube. They were pulled as result of a copyright claim by Axiom 10 Productions... a Florida non-profit TV production company... which is part of the Church of Scientology. Once again... big business is disguised as religion! Apparently Scientology is more interested in maintaining their own financial interests than exposing the 'mental health care' system! Nevertheless... the videos can be viewed at the following website...