Psychotherapy sessions are billed at the rate of $300.00 per 60-minute hour. Consultations and mentoring rates vary according to service. Contact Dr. Joseph @ [email protected] for the specific services you are inquiring about.
Dr. Joseph is not a direct provider with specific insurance panels. After considering the issues in this section, if you chose to seek reimbursement from your insurance company for your treatment, Dr. Joseph will assist you in obtaining mental health coverage reimbursement from your insurance company by providing statements for sessions and services you have paid for out of pocket. You may be eligible on your specific policy for reimbursement of services from out of network providers. All policies are different, and you will need to check with your carrier as to what your benefits are by calling the customer service telephone number on your insurance card and asking specifically about your out of network behavioral health benefits.
Before you decide to utilize your insurance benefits for psychological treatment coverage consider the following:
Firstly, your health insurance company is not a human entity. It is in business to make money by keeping your utilization of services at a minimum. Insurance companies claim to ‘care’ about you, but whether they do or not is highly questionable. In order to maintain their profits they are always going to limit your sessions to as few as possible and as soon as you show even minor signs of improvement, they will look to terminate their financial obligation to your treatment, often cutting the client off from treatment before the psychologist would recommend cessation of sessions.
Secondly, in order to obtain insurance company financial support for your treatment, they require that psychologists provide personal information that can affect your ability to get health, life and disability insurance in the future.
Thirdly, once Dr. Joseph is authorized with your consent to release confidential information to your insurance company, it is impossible to control who will ultimately see it and how it will be used. When you utilize your mental health coverage on your insurance policy, the company will require very detailed information about your personal problems, symptoms and concerns. Often this information is of the type that you want to be held confidential and shared only with Dr. Joseph (or other professionals that you may have given written permission for her to speak with to coordinate care). However, when using your mental health benefits, the insurance company will require documentation of this information and they will put it in their computers and certain people within their company will see it. Although the insurance company claims that their employees will use that information appropriately, Dr. Joseph cannot guarantee that. By disclosing information to your insurance company regarding your psychotherapeutic treatment, Dr. Joseph will have no control over the confidentiality of the information that they required to be released.
Fourthly, insurance companies require that you be given a current psychiatric diagnosis in order to consider financially contributing to your therapy sessions. Many people consult Dr. Joseph for problems of daily living and situations that are encountered that do not warrant them to have a ‘psychiatric diagnosis’. Indeed, life is complex and challenging and it makes perfect sense that people would want to consult a psychologist that specializes in emotional and behavioral self-management, communication and issues related to relationships, self-esteem, work, school, family etc… However, in order to have these sessions financially considered by your health insurance company, you will have to be given a mental and / or behavioral diagnosis that may not be correct or may be more serious than what is actually true to get paid by the insurance company. Combined with the confidentiality and stigmatization issues covered in points 1, 2 and 3 above, this may work against you in ways that you hadn’t anticipated and that could negatively affect you.