NAM’s Vital Directions for Health Care 2025: Implications for Mental Health
TL/DR –
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) suggests that a radical change in health care, supervised by a federally controlled Health System Accountability Board, can drastically improve mental health and medical education for mental disorders. The board will oversee all health care, ensuring cost-effective and quality care for all Americans, and punishing entities that fail to meet guidelines. NAM suggests that replacing the traditional theory of mind-body separation with a system-based biopsychosocial model, which integrates biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors, can greatly improve mental health care.
The National Academy of Medicine’s Bold Health Care Directions for 2025
The National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM) 2025 Vital Directions for Health and Health Care unveils sweeping changes with major implications for mental health and medical education in mental disorders. This independent, unbiased entity aims to promote science, shape policies, and trigger actions for universal optimal health.
It underscores the threats to health care from the medical industrial complex (MIC) comprising hospitals, insurance firms, pharmaceutical companies, and equipment manufacturers. These profit-oriented entities disregard prevention, neglect costs, and control the course of health care.
NAM suggests a federal agency, similar to the Federal Reserve in autonomy and power, to supervise all health care. The proposed “Health System Accountability Board” will guarantee cost-effective, quality, and safe care for all Americans. To maintain its independence, the Board will have an odd number of members appointed by the president in staggered terms, and they will need Senate approval. These members cannot have any financial stake in health care organizations.
The Board will oversee a balanced relationship between the benefits nonprofit hospitals get and the resources they provide to the community. It will also ensure hospitals’ involvement in public health programs related to enhanced outcomes and significant financial aid for individuals beneath the 400% poverty level. Health equity firms’ control over care delivery organizations will be prohibited by a congressional mandate.
The new Board will set these principles: equal access to quality, safe care for everyone; emphasis on primary care; care payment for populations (not fee-for-service); consideration of social determinants of health; administrative efficiency; reduction of health care expenditures; organizational professionalism; ethical mandates; and data-driven decision making.
This shift will especially benefit mental health care, which currently lags in access, quality, and safety in U.S. health care.
Revolutionizing Mental Health Care
The writer stresses the need to replace the mind-body split theory currently guiding patient care, teaching, and research. The persistence of this theory, despite its drawbacks, is blamed on medical education’s indoctrination over several years. Radical reform in medical education is emphasized as the starting point to replace this outdated theory with the modern systems view of science followed by other scientific fields.
Future medical students and practitioners will be trained in the same systems-based science. The systems-based biopsychosocial model, implemented through evidence-based patient-centered practices, will replace the mind-body duality as the guiding theory for medicine.
For a more comprehensive exploration of mental health care reform, the writer recommends his book Has Medicine Lost Its Mind.
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