Last week, the New York Times, among other places, published
a largely PR piece on Aetna's new plan to pay doctors to test their patients for depression. This ought to be good news. We should be happy that Aetna--big, heartless, claim-denying, profit-driven corporation that it is--is actually doing something to make the world a better place. It's not like they are necessarily up to something sneaky. The businesses that hire apparently lose large sums to depression in the form of absenteeism and reduced productivity. So if Aetna provides depression screening and increases depression treatment, employees will be served and employers will see their productivity increase. Aetna, in turn, will sell more of its product. It's the free market working for everyone.
Nonetheless, I find Aetna's plan deeply unsettling.
In our health care system the cheapest way to treat depression is with drugs. I fear that an insurance company whose goal is to improve its clients' workers' productivity through treatment of depression is a perfect first step toward creating a Brave New World in which workers are drugged into productive complacency. It's just possible that workers are depressed because, say, they don't like their jobs or they don't like the role they are forced to play in a society that they don't like either. Leave your employees alone to work through their depression and they might come to realize how much they hate their jobs or the companies they work for. Such enlightenment would be VERY BAD FOR BUSINESS. Better to keep them drugged, keep them happy and keep them busy in their tidy little cubicles.
Seriously, I don't think, really, that this is a nefarious plan hatched by some evil super business genius in one of Aetna's board rooms.
No. I think it was planned by the government.
No, seriously, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think it was planned at all. I really think that the people of Aetna believe they are doing a good thing for the world that will also help their bottom line. This is indeed how the free market is supposed to work for us all.
Still, the potential result is a systematic dampening of worker discontent through drugs. That is inherently evil. And super scary.