ECT: the Cash Cow for Hospital Psychiatric Units

     In her recent interview on a Gaslit Truth YouTube podcast, Sarah Hancock, co-author of an extensive international study of the effects of ECT on women, notes that Medicare only requires an initial approval to reimburse a hospital for a patient’s electro shock treatments. Once approved, there is no restriction for a patient to receive as many shocks as “needed.”

     The typical course of initial ECT treatment runs around twelve sessions for a patient, sometimes less, sometimes more. However, because any positive effect from the ECT is usually short lived, many patients find themselves prescribed ongoing “maintenance” shock sessions. Sometimes those last for months, sometimes for years.

     Some patients have received over a hundred shock treatments to keep their “mental disorders” under control. One man in Connecticut is known to have received more than five hundreds shocks as his ongoing mental health “maintenance.”

     Because neither the FDA nor any other governmental agency has issued a legal requirement to report the number of ECT patients or the number of treatments given in America, we can only approximate that there are between 100,000 and 200,000 patients receiving ECT each year. If each of those patients only received the average twelve sessions, that would be between 1 and 2 million sessions delivered. Add in those patients who receive ongoing maintenance ECT sessions, and that number grows even larger.

     The average charge to insurance for an individual ECT session in America is $2333.00.

     Medicare only has to have that first ECT session approved. After that, as many as deemed “necessary” can be delivered and still be reimbursed by Medicare.

     Someone who receives only twelve sessions nets a hospital almost $30,000 dollars…plus any additional charges for the nurses, doctors, and anesthesiologists needed for the delivery.

     Given the fact that an ECT session might take thirty minutes, tops, that’s a mighty hefty fee per minute.
Those poor souls who have been prescribed one hundred or more maintenance sessions are going to net a hospital about a quarter of a million dollars each, just for the ECT itself. That one fellow in Connecticut earned his hospital’s psychiatric department $1,166,500.

     Even if every ECT patient in America only received the average twelve sessions, that makes ECT a $4 billion a year industry.

     You can fund a lot of hospital psychiatric units for that.