Eating Disorder Recovery
There’s a lucrative cottage industry in the U.S. for the residential treatment of almost anything you can imagine. Everything from “Internet addiction†and drug and alcohol problems, to eating and mood disorders. If you can treat it in an outpatient setting, the thinking goes, why not treat it in a “residential†setting for 30 or more days where you control every aspect of the patient’s life?
The “residential†treatment approach has long been available for eating disorders, since the treatment of these disorders tends to be long and complicated. Andrew Pollack writing for the New York Times notes how these kinds of programs have now become the focus of insurance companies looking to cut back on treatment options.
It’s no surprise, really. With the rollout of mental health parity — requiring that insurance companies can no longer discriminate against people with mental disorders for their treatment options — those companies are looking for other places they can cut costs. Residential treatment for eating disorders appears to be one obvious area.
So is residential treatment a legitimate modality for helping people with eating disorders? Should insurance companies cover the costs of such care?
According to one study (Frisch et al., 2006), the average length of stay in a residential treatment center for an eating disorder is 83 days. That’s nearly 3 months of full-time, round-the-clock treatment and care. The cost for such care? On average, it’s $956 per day. You read that right — nearly $1,000/day is the average cost for such care. That means a single patient at such a treatment center is bringing in, on average, $79,348.
Proponents of residential treatment admit there’s little research to back its use for eating disorders, but are adamant such programs are effective and needed:
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