RE: http://www.joplinglobe.com/healthandfamily/local_story_114181758.html

A few questions:
1. When does 400 contact hours (which is what the bill calls for) make two years of coursework? A single course is 45-50 hours. That's about 8-9 college courses. Paramedics get 1,000 hours of training and they can't prescribe.

2. Did you know that psychologists who learned how to prescribe medicine in home-study courses would be allowed to practice under this bill? They are ALREADY being trained at home, on the telephone and on the internet. Do you want someone who learned to practice medicine at home giving you drugs?

3. Have you seen that this bill would allow any kind of physician to "supervise" home-schooled psychologists for as little as they want, as long as it's weekly? It can be a 15-minute telephone conversation with a dermatologist hundreds of miles away. Is that how you want your prescribing "doctor" to be trained?

4. Why is it when you look up MoFACT you get MoPA, the Missouri Psychological Association which really started this "grass roots" organization?

5. Why doesn't MoPA support alternative training methods for psychologists that involve medical training facilities, rather than the private and expensive psychology school headed by the person who also heads MoPA?

Because "higher education" and pharmaceutical manufacturers (which today are THE main source of mental "health care") are both uncontrollable cartels?

Im not stating my opinion on this matter, but a possible response would be that a single visit to a psychologist is a lot less expensive than a visit to a psychologist and a doctor. Medicine is expensive, not just expensive, but prohibitively expensive for many people. If I were a person of limited means and the opportunity came up for me to have a psychologist write me a prescription for my medication, instead of the prohibitively expensive doctor then I would jump at it. Medical attention of a lower quality is better than no medical attention at all. And for a lot of people that is the choice they are living with.