No Surprises BIlling

Beginning in January of 2022, the Public Health Services Act, a new federal law, requires Health Care Providers to provide information about rights and protections to help prevent surprise and unexpected billing.  Many have experienced the shock of medical bills following a trip to the ER, surgery, or other medical procedure.  Since therapists/counselors are considered Health Care Providers, we are included in this effort to prevent surprise billing.

Keep in mind that overall therapy/counseling costs cannot be estimated like a surgical or other medical procedure.  The number of sessions of your work in counseling depends on many factors to be evaluated collaboratively between you and your therapist.  The best we can do is to inform you of session fees and help educate about possible insurance benefits.

Cash billing is used when you are paying for your counseling services with cash, check, or credit card and are not attempting to file insurance claims.  Counselors who are working towards getting licensed and interns are not authorized to file insurance claims.  You can file insurance and then you will pay your copay/coinsurance for each session.  If you have a late cancellation or no show charge that is charged directly to you, insurance does not pay for those. 

When paying cash for services, the billing at Trauma Wellness is simple.  You just pay the therapist’s fee for each session conducted, cancelled less than 24 hours in advance, or that you did not show and did not contact the therapist.  The only additional charges would be for letters you request the counselor to write.  The fee structure for that is based on the time it takes to prepare and write the letter and it is the same as the session fee per half hour up to one and a half hours.  So there are no surprise or hidden fees.  In some cases where a client expresses financial hardship, a therapist is free to reduce his or her fee to accommodate the hardship.  This results in a Net Session Fee.  Any reduction of this kind is discussed and agreed to between therapist and client.  There are no surprises here.  The Net Session Fee is the maximum your therapist will charge you for a 50-minute hour session.

You and your therapist will agree upon a schedule for therapy that is typically weekly or bi-weekly which will effect the amount you pay per month as there are 4 weeks in a month meaning that you could pay for 2 sessions a month or for 4 sessions a month depending on what you discuss with your therapist.