Session payment is made through a secure autopay system in your Client Portal with a credit card, HSA, or FSA.

Some insurance companies will reimburse or credit out-of-network providers if you submit a monthly superbill. If your insurance company covers mental health care you can see if you have out-of-network coverage by calling the number on the back of your card.

Why I choose Private Pay 

(instead of insurance)

Therapists treat client care and ethical considerations with great respect and thoughtfulness. Although other therapist have thought long and hard about ethics and client care and landed on using insurance (which I respect 100%), I’ve outlined below my values in client and ethical principles that have lead me to choose offering a private pay clinic:

Client Confidentiality

I have a really high value of maintaining client confidentiality – not only because it is my ethical obligation, but because I know how important it is to have one place in the world where you can say anything and not have to worry about who might find out. 

Involving insurance compromises that high level of client privacy because there’s a third set of eyes on your private information. Most often that’s a record of your diagnosis, but at times insurance companies may request a full record of services, including session notes. 

I am personally unwilling to hand over that kind of information 

1. To someone who is not a trained mental health professional 

2. When I can’t guarantee the degree of care with which that information will be protected 

3. To a complete stranger with whom my client has not built trust.

Thorough Diagnosis

When working with insurance, a therapist is required to submit a diagnosis for treatment to get covered. This means that a therapist has to diagnose a client after the first session in order to get those services covered.

Thats one.

50-minute.

Appointment.

🤯

To me that is just way too little time to make an accurate assessment of a whole person, considering the whole picture of who they are and what has led to their current struggle. 

A rushed diagnosis that goes on your health record…🤔

Accurate Diagnosis

In addition, each insurance company gets to decide which diagnoses it will cover. So if your diagnosis happens to not be on this company’s list…you’re out of luck. 

Or you may be misdiagnosed in order to be able to get your treatment covered, which may seem like a clever workaround (we won’t discuss the ethics of that here). But the treatment that you receive has to be in line with the diagnosis on your chart. 

So your treatment may be in accordance with the insurance’s acceptable standards of treating depression…but what if your actual struggle is because of complex trauma, which is going untreated?

Appropriate & Effective Treatment

Insurance companies get to decide what they deem are acceptable interventions for treating your mental health.   

Not only are non-mental health professionals making a decision that is outside of their scope, they are also making a decision that is in the best interest of their bottom dollar…and not your well-being.

Not using insurance allows me more flexibility in finding a treatment approach that works for my client. This means that if you come in for depression and traditionally-covered treatment isn’t working for you (i.e. CBT), we get to utilize other research-supported treatment strategies that finally make that sustainable change you’ve been looking for. 

Reduced Rate

Therapists who choose to work with insurance (God-bless-them) have to play a bit of a game of cat-and-house with setting their rates. Each insurance company gets to decide how much they will reimburse for therapy sessions. This means that some insurance companies pay therapists well, and some pay therapists in peanuts. 

Therapists who work with insurance then have to set a higher rate so that the amount they are reimbursed evens out to a livable wage, driving the cost of therapy higher and higher. 

Being Private Pay allows me to set one fair rate that is almost half that of the going rate of insurance-supported therapists in my area.