Patrick Kennedy

It's not just the homeless populations.

It's our newest generation of workers who are coming in, who are suffering, according to all indicators, with much higher risk.

levels of depression and anxiety.

This is a phenomenon now that needs the leadership of employers because they dictate what the policies are in the workplace in terms of employer benefits, employee benefits, EAPs.

employee assistance programs, as well as how the payers structure what the kind of care is that will be considered primary care, which will mean that it's not going to impede an employee from gaining access to that treatment because of really high deductibles and co-pays and the like.

It's all in aligning the financial incentives.

And the most salient issue is we know good mental health has a huge ROI.

That ROI can be defined in numerous ways, lower absentee rates, much higher productivity rates, hence lower presenteeism, much less comorbidities in terms of disability, but

Ultimately, it's only going to happen if you structure the value proposition and the risk proposition by payers in a way that doesn't have to be defined in such a narrow window.

of time, the way most insurance companies evaluate ROI.

And that's what really precludes us as a healthcare system from investing in what has all kinds of ancillary benefits to the employer community.

which they ought to be insisting that their third-party administrators really focus on.

But the third-party administrators do not take into their value proposition the lower disability, the lower presenteeism, and the lower absenteeism.

That's not part of their metric.

And because it's not, they do not evaluate towards it.

And hence, they're not giving employers

the kind of product that the employer should demand.

That's only going to happen if companies lay this out at the C-suite level and say, you've never thought of it in these ways, but perhaps it's important for you to start to think about this.

So we need a toolkit as policymakers, as advocates, as politicians.

There's just no voice for these issues.