Currently, Illinois is waiting on the governor's signature to make eating disorders treatment part of mandatory health insurance.

You wouldn't leave out Alzheimer's. Or Parkinson's. Or a brain tumor. So why eating disorders? They're brain diseases, too. Just because you can't see the differences by looking directly at someone's brain doesn't mean that they're not just as real.

Of course, the insurance companies have their proverbial panties in a bunch over this. In the Chicago Tribune article cited above, the high cost of eating disorders treatment was cited as a reason the companies didn't want to cover them.

But my insurance covers organ transplants. I have a $1 million lifetime limit on that. If that coverage was suddenly dropped, people would be up in arms.

Up.
In.
Arms.

But if eating disorders were treated properly--early and aggressively--you might have an overall decrease in cost over time. From the Tribune article:

"As with other serious illnesses, early intervention can save victims' lives and insurers' money, before patients end up in the intensive-care unit on a feeding tube, with heart and kidney failure, she and other advocates say. "With cancer, we don't wait until tumors spread throughout the body," Elsner said."

Frankly, eating disorders shouldn't be covered because it's cost effective. They should be covered because they are real illnesses happening to real people and there are real treatments out there.