Fox News' Keith Ablow down on health care system

In response to the Sandy Hook massacre, Fox News' in-house psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow says contemplating the Second Amendment "squanders time." The problem needing attention, he says, is the way America's health care system, "partly insurance-company driven," addresses mental illness.

From FoxNews.com:

The mental health care system is now itself dangerously devoid of the ability to understand patients’ lives, empathize with their suffering and help them beyond their depression and rage.

The constantly changing, partly insurance-company driven, "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"—which pretends to accurately describe the range of psychiatric suffering through the use of 300 sterile diagnostic labels (conveniently ready for matching up to medications), is part of the problem, too.

The demands of insurance companies, including Medicare and Medicaid and every public insurance program, has been to cram down the educational level of clinicians more and more and more. ...

Insurance companies will only pay for overcrowded psychiatric units, often in disrepair, in which the violent mentally ill are often lumped into one space (and share rooms) with depressed young adults, drug addicted homeless folks and the elderly suffering with dementia.

Most of these units are revolving doors where someone can assault his mother or threaten to kill her on a Friday and be discharged with a new prescription on Monday.

It's a critique you don't hear too often from Fox News personnel. And this is why we read Ablow.