Blue Cross Blue Shield Massachusetts CEO Andrew Dreyfus believes it’s time to rebalance government and social spending to address the elephant in the room called mental health. Appreciating European models of investing heavily in prevention and support, Dreyfus in a recent interview said that delivering health care services is not the most powerful predictor of good health. Excerpts from the interview:
- He said that as a community and society when you look at some European models you can see that they invest much more heavily in prevention and social service and support, whether it’s for housing or childhood education, and much less than what we spend on the back end on insurance and medical care. “So you have to start trying to rebalance our overall government and social spending on those areas. I think you hit on some of the important areas that you know in the social community we call the so-called social determinants of health.”
- Dryfus, who believed mental age should be addressed from a very young age, added, “We know that delivering health care services is not the most powerful predictor of good health. It’s much more. Do you have adequate housing? Are you living in a safe environment? Do you have the right educational and income support? How is our criminal justice system oriented? So, I think, we do have to recognize that mental health is an issue that spans all kinds of funding areas and it has to be much greater focussed because it would be wonderful in rare cases where within a prison or a jail system we have a good mental health treatment program. But that is so too late.”
- He suggested that mental health care should start in childhood. “Some early work I did in my career is called infant-mental heal. You actually have to start treating mental health before a child is even born. We know that if a child is born in a household with domestic violence or substance use or other issues that some of the professionals call it kind of toxic stress that has a long-term impact on the mental health of people.”
- Dryfus went on to say that some of the really interesting work is being planned by Jack Shankoff and his colleagues at the Harvard child study center and “we have to intervene much earlier. We have to kind of not see all these funding streams as separate but we have to integrate them.”