This blog entry is a little different in that it is not about helping you have a better relationship/marriage directly. However, indirectly it will help you choose the best therapist (which hopefully will be us) and thereby helping you have a better relationship/marriage.

A Better Family Now has been seeing clients for 5 years and we have always been a self-pay facility. Many people ask why we do not accept insurance, and I’m sure many more people wonder who probably never asked. When I started the company I knew I did not want to deal with the hassle of insurance. About a year after starting the company I heard of a lawsuit filed by the pyschiatrists and doctors of Texas against LMFTs and LPCs with the attempt to take away their authority to diagnose. If won then it meant that a lot of therapists would lose money because the insurance companies require a diagnosis. This lawsuit did not affect A Better Family Now (ABFN) because we were not accepting insurance and not required to give clients a diagnosis. That lawsuit convinced me to stay as a self-pay therapist.

Fast forward to 2019 and I was considering accepting a few insurance clients. We finally began to do the research to weigh the pros and cons to accepting insurance and it did not take long to conclude that we would not be accepting insurance.

Here are the reasons we have decided not to accept insurance:

• When you accept insurance you essentially become an employee of the insurance company. They decide what you can and cannot bill for and for how long.

• Insurance companies require you to give the client a diagnosis. When seeing couples, what diagnosis do you give the couple? Anxiety? Depression? Whatever diagnosis you give then you have to include in your notes the interventions used for that specific diagnosis.

• Insurance companies will not pay our full fee. This means that we would have to take on more cases which I feel would lessen our effectiveness as therapists. The business does have to grow, but not at the expense of quality care. I want to focus on therapy and helping clients, not getting more clients so we can stay in business.

• Insurance companies pay therapists 30 days after services have been rendered and that’s if the claim does not get rejected.

• We want to be in complete control of how we treat you. The insurance company does not know what if best for our clients. If we want to take you on a couple-building field trip we do not want to have to clear that with the insurance company.

We understand that everyone cannot pay out of pocket. We are not trying to be the therapist of everyone. We want to help the clients who are looking for our unique skills and willing to make the investment to have a better life. The way we structure our fees makes it affordable and below the average for Pearland therapists.

Therapy is an investment into your future. You are worth the investment. Give us a chance to help you live the life you were created to live.