I charge a standard hourly rate for all clinical services, including assessment, therapy, and psychological testing.
- My rate is currently set at: $225 per hour
- I accept payment in the form of: cash, check, credit card, HSA/FSA, or Venmo
Payment is due at the time of service. For psychological testing, the majority of work happens after our meeting — in scoring, analyzing, and compiling results. Therefore, the estimated costs of psychological testing are due at the beginning of testing. Additional charges may be billed at the end if extra time is needed to administer additional tests, review medical records, conduct interviews related to the case, or other related activities.
Insurance Reimbursement
As a licensed psychologist, my fees qualify for reimbursement under nearly any insurance plan that offers out-of-network benefits for mental health services. I’m not an in-network provider, and so I do not work directly with insurance by billing them or providing any clinical information to them, and I cannot guarantee that they will reimburse costs of assessment or treatment.
If you have a PPO plan and would like to seek reimbursement for service costs from your insurance company, it’s usually a fairly painless process, but your results may vary. It’s worth calling your insurance company to ask them how much you can expect to be reimbursed for assessment and/or treatment by an out-of-network psychologist. For therapy, I use procedure code 90837 for one-hour sessions.
Once a month, I provide billing statements with all the information you need to file your claim. You can either submit a claim form directly to your insurance company, or use a service like Reimbursify to simplify the process.
Rationale for remaining out-of-network
Many people ask me why I don’t work with insurance directly. Here are some of the reasons:
- Insurance companies will only pay for therapy in cases where symptoms meet criteria for a qualifying mental health diagnosis, whether or not they cause significant suffering.
- Insurance companies often place restrictions on the type or amount of therapy that can be provided, and require time-consuming reviews and special documentation to justify the therapist’s clinical judgment.
- Your therapy records are not private when going through insurance. In-network providers agree to allow claims adjustors to audit your complete record any time they want.
- In the event that congress or the courts repeal protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, your mental health diagnosis could be used as a pre-existing condition to deny payment for future services.
- The fees set by insurance companies are rarely more than half of the actual cost for psychotherapy, and often change without notice. You can look up objective information about the actual cost for psychotherapy in your zip code from the independent nonprofit, FAIR Health. (My fees are well within the usual, customary range for my area.)
Because I remain completely independent from managed care, the treatment I provide is based on my own clinical judgment, and on your needs and preferences, rather than what insurance companies decide they are willing to pay for. Patients pay me directly for my services, and I don’t work for anyone but them.