Health Insurance & Medical Benefits

One of the most reliable and consistent ways to make therapy more affordable is to use any health insurance or medical benefits that you have access to.  Of course not everyone does have coverage (which is another discussion in and of itself) but if you do…USE IT! You might have access through your own insurance, your parents insurance, or through other benefits provided by your employer. Don’t skip ahead too fast…but if you already know that these strategies aren’t going to work for you can move on to the next one!

Going Through Insurance

There are a few paths you can take to use your insurance coverage to reduce the cost of therapy. The most cost effective way is to find an “in-network” therapist or mental health provider. Usually, an in-network provider will charge you a low copay amount and then bill your insurance provider the balance. To find an in-network therapist a great place to start is your providers website where hopefully you should be able to find a listing of the therapists that are contracted with your provider and then you can search to find one near you. Depending on your providers website you might get more or less information about the therapists listed there. If the information feels like its not enough for you to get a good feel for the therapists you can always try to find more information on that therapist by looking for a Psychology Today profile or their own website.

If for someone reason you can’t find an in-network provider in your area or maybe just not one you’d want to work with (which is critical) another option you can explore is an “out-of-network” provider. Not all insurance policies will give you this option but you should always ask just so you have all the information. An out-of-network provider is a therapist that is not contracted through your insurance company but your insurance company will still reimburse you for their services. The reimbursement is often less than they would cover for an in-network provider but it can still be significant. You will likely need to pay out of pocket for each therapy session but the therapist will give you a “superbill” that you can submit to your insurance for them to process the reimbursement. Even though this might not be the cheapest alternative and requires some extra work submitting the superbills it also gives you the ability to seek out a wider range of therapists to find the right fit.

Other Work Benefits

You should also check in with your HR department to see if these other two strategies might be available. The first is to explore is you have an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), these programs exist to help care for a companies employees wellbeing. They can sometimes provide a limited number of sessions to a therapist to work on specific goals. Unfortunately, the explicit goal of these programs is to get struggling employees back to their previous level of functioning and productivity at work…so its not purely out of the goodness of the companies heart. However, if you are feeling anxious or depressed (even related to things not at work) it does impact your ability to work so in someways as long as you can frame your need for therapy in terms of how it impacts you at work you’ll have a lot of freedom about what you want to work on with the therapist.

Also look into whether or not your employer puts away money into any kind of medical savings account or flexible spending account for you.  Some companies put extra money aside for their employees to use for particular purposes. If the company you work for does this you might be able to use it toward therapy.

If you can combine a few of these strategies it’s likely you can get close to free therapy. Finding an out-of-network therapist and using a flexible spending account to cover the copay is wonderful way to go for example. Or using your EAP to get you either free or heavily discounted therapy, even if it’s for a limited amount of sessions is a great option too.