Mental health ‘ghost networks’ — and a ghost-buster

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For lots of people, trying to access mental health treatment — like a therapist or a psychiatrist —is nothing short of a horror story. You could even call it a ghost story.

A “Ghost network” is what researchers and journalists call it when your insurance plan offers a list of “in-network” providers that turns out to be bogus.

Attorney Abigail Burman has studied this haunted phenomenon, and she’s become a part-time volunteer ghostbuster for people in her life. She’s here to share her tactics with us — including some key legal terms that can provide leverage.

Abigail has written up a guide to her strategy, and she’s given us permission to share it. You’ll find it — lightly edited, and with some additional insights from our talk with her, over on First Aid Kit.

Warning: No silver bullets here. It’s still really, really hard. But Abigail has definitely got some hard-won insights we can use.

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. So one topic we have not addressed on this show till now has been mental health.
0:06.1	And not because it isn't important, right? I mean, just to ask anybody who's lived through a
0:10.4	multi-year global pandemic. And it's not like access to mental health, like figuring out how to
0:16.2	pay for it or how to get insurance to pay for it isn't a problem. I mean, it's actually pretty much
0:21.0	the opposite. It's maybe the biggest problem. It's just notoriously horrible. And we haven't gone
0:26.6	there because, well, number one, the horror stories are endless. And two, I've had absolutely
0:34.4	nothing to offer in terms of what are we going to do about it till now? Because now I've met
0:40.4	somebody who's actually won a battle in this awful domain. My name is Abigail Berman and I am an
0:46.6	attorney specializing in consumer protection, healthcare, and technology. Abigail is also a policy
0:52.0	expert on some of these problems. And she's become a problem solver for people in our life.
0:57.4	It's become a little bit of my superpower to just help friends find an in-network therapist or
1:02.6	in-network psychiatrist. Or if there's basically no such thing to get their insurance to pay for an
1:08.3	out-of-network provider. Abigail sent me a checklist she had posted to an online forum with a title,
1:14.8	a broad guide to getting therapy slash psych appointments covered when you can't find anyone in
1:19.8	network. And it's based on steps Abigail took on behalf of a friend recently. And you know,
1:24.6	it's terrific. And it combines the usual unreasonable amount of persistence and grit and time that
1:32.4	not everybody has. And add some key legal knowledge. Now, this legal key won't open every door,
1:39.8	of course, in its shape. And whether it's going to work for you at all, depends on where you get
1:44.2	your insurance and on where you live. And in fact, even with that legal knowledge on her side,
1:50.8	the steps in Abigail's checklist aren't exactly what worked for Abigail in this case, because it took
1:56.6	more. Again, more than is reasonable, more than most of us have in us, frankly. But we're going to
2:03.6	share here what did work, because there are insights here that even us non-superheroes can
	...

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