Recoome posted:

I'll shut up about the psych poo poo after this but the risk arising from this decision is that we pull the ladder of mental healthcare up slightly again, meaning a stack of people who may have been able to afford those gap payments will not get treatment and are left to the winds of fate. Will they get better by themselves? Will they experience a decline enough to require acute services (a huge and extremely negative outcome)? Somewhere in the middle? It's a bit ghoulish by Mark Butler to cite "... the need to do more to support people in rural and low socio-economic areas" but also reduce the ability for those people to access psychological services without announcing additional support.

This decision literally only impacts the consumers of mental health services. Everyone I know has a stack of work, and they had a stack of work prior to COVID too so really