Is there any data to support this? I was talking to my therapist about it recently and she suggested the opposite. There’s a huge glut of therapists, they just only want to have clients who pay out of pocket because then they offload the work of any insurance reimbursement, paperwork or other overhead to the client. She also suggested therapists want good filters to avoid difficult clients, like low-income clients that have a hard time paying and have more difficult social or behavioral issues.
As I understood it, she was saying basically this:
1. therapists typically just want to work freelance, make their own hours, and don’t mind having very few clients / taking extended breaks from working many hours.
2. therapists don’t want to deal with “challenging” clients (who generally are the most in need of therapy in the first place). “Ability to pay out of pocket” is a good filter to implicitly reject “undesirable” clients.
3. therapists want to externalize the labor burden of coordinating with insurance onto the patient
4. None of this has any connection to charging higher prices - that’s a separate supply & demand phenomenon based on the talent of the therapist, population & demographics of the area, and specializations that deal with issues more correlated with wealthy clients.
My impression from all this has been a massive negative opinion of “working class” therapists and counselors, to the point where I believe they should be required to accept insurance and they should be required to manage the paperwork process of insurance claims as a regulated condition of practicing therapy - it’s a matter of public health that’s in all our collective best interest to enforce with regulation.
> Is there any data to support this? I was talking to my therapist about it recently and she suggested the opposite. There’s a huge glut of therapists, they just only want to have clients who pay out of pocket because then they offload the work of any insurance reimbursement, paperwork or other overhead to the client. She also suggested therapists want good filters to avoid difficult clients, like low-income clients that have a hard time paying and have more difficult social or behavioral issues.
Try to find a psychologist, not therapist (there are many paths to get qualifications to become a therapist, and not all of them are exactly HQ), in the pacific NW some time.
As I understood it, she was saying basically this:
1. therapists typically just want to work freelance, make their own hours, and don’t mind having very few clients / taking extended breaks from working many hours.
2. therapists don’t want to deal with “challenging” clients (who generally are the most in need of therapy in the first place). “Ability to pay out of pocket” is a good filter to implicitly reject “undesirable” clients.
3. therapists want to externalize the labor burden of coordinating with insurance onto the patient
4. None of this has any connection to charging higher prices - that’s a separate supply & demand phenomenon based on the talent of the therapist, population & demographics of the area, and specializations that deal with issues more correlated with wealthy clients.
My impression from all this has been a massive negative opinion of “working class” therapists and counselors, to the point where I believe they should be required to accept insurance and they should be required to manage the paperwork process of insurance claims as a regulated condition of practicing therapy - it’s a matter of public health that’s in all our collective best interest to enforce with regulation.