National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers, Inc.

an educational foundation and advocacy organization serving mental health consumers and professionals

Welcome to the Website of the National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers--the most outspoken and steadfast organization involved in the movement to secure honesty and true quality for all in health care. 

Our members are consumers of mental health care, consumer advocates, and members of all professional mental health disciplines.  We know that to accomplish such an overwhelmingly large task, which means coming up against the wealthy and powerful managed care industry, we must all stand together, strong and united.

The goals of the National Coalition are first, to expose and regulate  the destructive aspects of managed care, and second, to replace managed care with a more pro-patient, pro-quality system.  Since November, 1992, when we first formed, we have been one of the only organizations calling for an end to managed care.

Managed care has radically changed health care in our nation.  We believe that managed care, whether it is for-profit or not-for-profit, is inherently an immoral, unethical system.  We believe that no matter how much managed care is regulated, it will never be pro-patient or pro-quality.  We believe that the evidence shows that managed care is destructive to patients, to families trying to attend to the needs of their loved ones, to clinicians, to the professions, to the education of new clinicians, and to human dignity. Managed care thus harms our citizens, our families, our communities, and our nation, and we must do something about it.

We are particularly concerned about people who need mental health care as well as the people who want to earnestly study and become the best clinicians they can be in order to help heal the emotional and mental pain that we know is so prevalent in our society.  Consumers of mental health care are often either too embarrassed, too depressed, too anxious, or in other ways less able than medical patients to openly expose how managed care is hurting them or to advocate for their treatment needs.  Because consumers of mental health care often remain silent, they are, unfortunately, managed care's "perfect victims," and we find the advantage being taken of them intolerable.

Now you know that we are "against" managed care, but what do we stand "for?"  We stand for the patient's right to the three fundamental freedoms of choice, privacy, and decision-making power in health care.  We stand for true quality and a system that encourages excellence in its clinicians rather than one that seeks cheap labor.  We stand for clinicians being free to do what is best for their patients and to be their patients' advocates without fear of being forced out of work for caring and for doing the right thing.  We stand for a system in which clinicians serve their patients and are successful or unsuccessful based on how they serve their patients, rather than for a system in which clinicians must try to serve insurers and employers as well as their patients, and are successful or unsuccessful based on how they preserve the financial needs of insurers and employers.

The National Coalition is the organization that is out in front of all others in the effort to move America past managed care and managed competition.  Our members have been extremely vocal in the public press and with legislators for several years.  Almost all information you have seen in the media--television, radio, newspapers, and magazines--exposing the serious problems of managed mental health care have been the work of, or involved in some way, the National Coalition and its leaders and Media Committee.  Those of our leaders who are professionals are also leaders in their professional associations, and they have been working to influence their associations to take stronger stands against managed care.