Many insurance companies will limit how many sessions a client can have before benefits run out. If you work with a therapist who specifically takes your insurance, you might run out of sessions before you feel ready to leave therapy or be forced to find another therapist with more reasonable rates to continue your therapeutic journey.

Furthermore, insurance mandates every client must be diagnosed with a disorder from the DSM-V-TR. By not billing insurances directly, therapists have more creative therapeutic freedom to tailor interventions to each client’s needs.

In order to approve a service claim, therapists must provide all diagnostic information to insurances. This means your diagnosis, therapeutic goals, and individual session notes are submitted to insurance companies after each session to “prove necessity of services.”

Cash pay clients do not have to worry about their private health information going anywhere or potentially being denied for lack of necessity.

Working with each insurance company comes with its own set of tedious enrollment paperwork to keep updated, occasional denial of claims made by the therapist, and frequent delays in reimbursing services. Utilizing a cash pay model frees up time spent fighting with insurances and helps eliminate headaches for therapists, while ensuring they are compensated appropriately for their services in a timely manner.

Many insurance plans do not cover mental health benefits until deductibles have been met. If this is how your insurance works, you will likely pay out of pocket for those services for most of, if not the whole, year. Don’t limit finding the right therapist for you simply because you want one that takes your insurance!