Who Owns and Operates Wilderness Therapy Programs?
A few wilderness therapy programs are still owned and operated much like medical care used to be years ago before managed health care took over. In the beginning, wilderness therapy programs were free standing alternatives to traditional approaches such as psychiatric hospitals, psychotherapy and juvenile corrections. Today, a few wilderness therapy programs are being bought out by larger corporations that use these programs as part of a referral network of boarding schools and transition home care programs for teenagers. The larger programs are using many of the same business approaches as managed health care corporations in order to create economics of scale, leverage and to generate revenue for their services from health care insurance. Some professionals wonder if health insurance re-imbursement will change the quality of wilderness therapy like it did health care. Some argue for the worst case scenario and others would say economic control by insurance companies will make the indu
