Psychotherapy covered by health insurance

Abstract

As discussions about the modalities of paying for psychotherapy out of national health insurance funds are underway in Austria, established psychotherapists and a small sample of the Austrian population have been polled about the diagnoses where they believe psychotherapy can be used meaningfully and should be paid by health insurance funds. It was found that there are substantial similarities in the opinions expressed by the population and established psychotherapists. Particularly when dealing with disorders that are generally regarded as being quite severe and involving considerable suffering, the population is convinced of the appropriateness of psychotherapy and deems financing through health insurance schemes necessary. As expected, however, and across all conditions/disorders, the population views the efficiency of psychotherapeutic treatment a lot more critically than the psychotherapists polled.

It is especially relevant for these discussions that more than half of the psychotherapists surveyed ranked psychotic disorders as well as addictions among those categories of diagnosis that they treat most infrequently in their independent practice of the profession. The requirement of additional qualifications set forth in by the contracts concluded with health insurance funds would thus be difficult to meet by all those psychotherapists who do not fall under variant A (i.e. who cannot prove that they have worked for one year, and for 40 hours per week, in a psychiatric ward). This is even true for physicians and clinical psychologists since experiences in other institutions alone are not sufficient. It must also be borne in mind that most psychotherapists derive their income primarily from another source (self-employment or employment), the average number of independently practiced weekly therapy hours being only 13.4.

Keywords:
Psychotherapy, diagnoses, contracts with health insurance funds, independently practiced psychotherapeutic treatment.