If a community agency made 250,000 a month or 3 million a year, I dont think the avg. psychologist salary would still be sub 6 figures. THanks for the humor though 😎
it's no humor, most psychologist don't know all the details or we think we are too good to look into community mental health. Most of psychologists have not been "in" on it, city often give special contracts to clinics who are willing to see inpatient discharges as priority intakes, meaning, they have to be given an intake within 5-7 days; in return, the agencies get approximately $300+ (over their $40 medicaid regular payment but have to do tons of paper work off course) for the sessions and we are talking about medicaid pts here. How many pt's do you think city hospital discharge a week? you do the math... now, there's a cap as to how much an agency can bill medicaid, that's negotiated, it could be 2 to 3 mil, you can bill over that amount but will have to be returned, but in stages, so the agency keeps the money in a high yield interest account and return portions of the overbilled amount as requested in stages.
And we all thought that psychologist are pretty smart huh? face it, most psychologists are not good business people. We think about providing good quality services, that can be measured by tools with solid properties. Do you really think that administrators care about that? That's why psychologists don't get hired for their worth because at the end, the city doesn't care either. We all know it, it's all about money, that's why psychologist get paid sub 6 figures. Most psychologist who work in community clinics are being hired for 'supervision' and for their licenses so other master's level clinicians can be bill under them.
how they use the money, well, they can channel it to other services, budget it, sometimes creatively, and present it to the city. We all know that this world is not so black and white? most CEO of large social service agencies are tied to politicians. Why do you think certain clinics can get these highly desired contracts in the first place and other can't; or others don't even know about them!
Just think about how poorly have the billions of $ designated for 9/11 and katrina have been spent. Huge amount of monies were almost simply given away to these agencies. All they had to do was to come up with some creative way to spend it, like coming up with an outreach program.
There were hardly any outcome measures required and very liberal auditing. The pressure was for the gov to spend the money and to show that things are being done. That was it. I distinctively recall one of the top administrators from such agency wishing quietly that Katrina happened in their state in order to get that money.
