The Green Bottle Strategy Towards Communal Healing Economics

Discover how to transform the feeling of oppression into empowerment within the complex sphere of mental health care. Join Aaron Mittan and me as we unravel the intricate relationship between equitability, finances, and mindset, and how these factors shape the experiences of mental health professionals and those seeking care. We confront the victim mentality head-on, highlighting its potential to stifle progress while emphasizing the critical role of accountability and choice in overcoming personal and professional hurdles. Our dialogue further probes the ethical challenges faced by private practice owners, as we expose the harsh realities of balancing accessibility and financial sustainability, sharing our journey through the murky waters of insurance dependence and the pursuit of equitable service delivery.

Listen to an honest exploration of our commitment to enhancing mental health care accessibility, as we consider implementing a 'green bottle method'—a sliding scale payment model to foster financial collaboration between therapist and client. Through this candid discussion, we lay bare the challenges new clinicians encounter, such as burnout and an onerous healthcare system, and deliberate the steps we're taking to support them, including ensuring fair compensation. We also reveal our pledge to disengage from insurance panels within six months, clarifying the anticipated transition and its repercussions for our practice and clientele. Accountability isn't just a buzzword in this episode; it's the very fabric of our resolve as we navigate the complexities of mental health care with empathy and decisive action.

Be sure to visit BizRadio.US to discover hundreds more engaging conversations, local events and more.

Transcript

Aubrey: 0:05

Welcome to Kindred Conversations, the show shining a light on mental health professionals in this area. I am Aubrey Baptista, your host, and here's Aaron Matan, my show producer. He's going to be here to talk about some equitability and finances in mental health businesses. I know that this is not an area that Aaron is necessarily an expertise in, but he is always here as a support to ask questions, to create clarification. So thanks for coming back, Aaron.

Aaron: 0:35

Yeah, I'm going to officially request co-host status.

Aubrey: 0:44

Well, I have a guest coming on next week, so we're going to have to bump you next week.

Aaron: 0:48

I'll tell you what I'll be here listening in.

Aubrey: 0:52

We can always have you join in if we need your help. Yeah so tell me about this.

Aubrey: 0:59

Yeah, so we were talking off mic earlier and we were just talking about this conference that I went to over the weekend and how impactful it was. And you know, a really interesting concept that I have been trying to just explore and navigate as a person as well as a professional for a long time has been this idea of like a victim mentality. So the victim mentality is the idea that there are things outside of my control that are oppressing me, that you know, that restrict my movement, and they're frustrating and they're things that, like, I just want to throw up my hands and the hair in the air and just be completely helpless about. Right. And this is really problematic, not just for me but for my clients, for people just in general, to feel as though, you know, there's just no ability to do anything differently. So there's just no ability to do anything differently, and I think that it's a big part of the reason that so many Americans feel stuck. So I'm curious what you think about that, aaron.

Aaron: 2:36

Yeah, I think that resonates put work towards will plateau and you know it's really hard to identify what some of the root causes are for that and you know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is, this is one of those ways where you can, you can help identify some of those root causes of that stuck feeling.

Aubrey: 2:57

Yeah, so you know, one of the one of the things that that I've really like kind of worked around is like, okay, well, if I'm not going to blame things outside of myself, right, the only thing that I can do is look inward and like, what can I do? Right, because that's true empowerment. Right, there is taking ownership and accountability for the actions that I really can take and what I can do, what I can choose to do with the information that is provided for me. Right, and you know, I got to back up here a little bit, because the purpose of what I'm talking about here is, yeah, there's the victim mentality and, like you know, kind of getting after it rather than and taking accountability rather than having a victim mindset. But this talk that we're having right here really is not all about that, right, but that was more of just a catalyst for where I'm going with this.

Aubrey: 3:53

The idea is that, you know, I've really struggled over the last year and a half since becoming a private practice owner, with the idea of accessibility and equitability. So I named my practice Kindred, right, because the idea of Kindred is that we take care of one another, that it's a family-based business, that we are based on the idea that we want to impact other people in a way that is positive and equitable and accessible, and I thought, coming into the business, you know from talking to different people and from my own experience, that accepting insurance in my practice was going to be a way to be able to open up accessibility for people. It's something that it just seemed that way, right, because I have my own insurance plan. I have Blue Cross of North Carolina it's the state health plan. My co-pays are actually zero dollars every single week and it's been wonderful.

Aubrey: 5:03

I've had an incredible therapist for the last year and a half. She's been really supportive to me and, yeah, so it's been a difficult thought process for me because I felt like, well, if I'm able to access therapy and I'm able to pay so little literally nothing out of pocket, I do pay for a pretty nice actual insurance plan through my husband's employer. So there is the upfront cost of the actual insurance plan. But I thought like, well, if this is what's being provided to me, then in turn, this is how I should turn around and provide this to my clients. That it only makes sense. And the added benefit to that is that when you are on the insurance panels, then you also have increased access to marketability. So, like putting your name on the listing directories and psychology today, and et cetera, et cetera, like it just makes you much more visible for those clients who are specifically looking for somebody within their insurance networks. So all of these things have been really beneficial to my practice.

Aubrey: 6:15

In fact, I even went so far as to shift from a third party insurance paneling program to starting to shift into independent insurance paneling, because I thought for a while, like you know what, like I'm going to start to expand into a group and I'm going to, you know, do this through insurance.

Aubrey: 6:40

And I went to this conference this weekend. Aaron and some things that I had already been thinking about about insurance really solidified for me and it came right back to this idea that I was talking about in the beginning about a victim mindset. Right? Is that I've been struggling with how do I scale this business to increase maximum impact and create accessibility for people in a way that doesn't have like corporate giants getting in the middle of our work and creating big barriers for us? Right? And it was a really frustrating thing for me because I felt like I had to throw my hands up in the air and like do this helplessness thing Right? It's like I don't want to do that. I'm a therapist, like I teach people how to not do that, you know, and what I realized through multiple conversations over the weekend was that I'm going to have to leave insurance panels.

Aaron: 7:44

It's tough because the natural justification is I'll have the opportunity to touch more clients than I would without it. But I don't think that's necessarily true, and we were talking before the show about kind of. The natural progression of success is, most of the time is is from letting go of the things that that kind of hold you back. And and that might be one of those things I can't answer it for you. I just I just record people talk about their stuff, but you know I'm no expert, but uh, I have had experience in that and I was sharing a little bit about, uh, my story from my wife and i's business on um. You know it's.

Aaron: 8:37

It's funny how you wouldn't think how much your mentality or your preconceived idea of how a business should operate or what you want out of it, will uh result in the, in the outcome of the business. And it's also counterintuitive because a lot of that determination and you know, uh, my, my wife calls it stubbornness, but you know a lot of that contributed to the, to the startup of the business and and really could be, could be accredited its success. But I think there's a, I think there's a threshold and I think there's a pivotal moment when you have to kind of realize that there's more at play, and understanding your why is really important at that point has to do with the status and the role that I play as a mental health provider, right, not just not just like within my, my community, but just like in the world.

Aubrey: 9:54

right, and I know that this sounds like so woo or whatever, right, but it's so important for us as business owners to be thinking about what is our impact and like how is this scalable so that we can really maximize what is our impact and the purpose of that really. So Grant Cardone talks about like our ethical obligation to do the best that we can, right to excel, and this is also like a spiritual principle that is put out there in many different gurus, but the idea being that, like you know, as a clinician, as a supervisor of clinicians, I have the ability to maximize my impact in terms of the mental health care system. And one of the biggest problems right now with the system is that there's just not enough providers. And the reason that there's not enough providers is because providers get out of graduate school and they try to start working with people and they realize how hard it is. The first thing that they're told to do is to go work in an agency setting, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but for somebody who is fresh out of school it's a recipe for burnout, right, and so it's not really the best system that we have set up right now and we are basically like hazing our early clinicians out of staying in the field.

Aubrey: 11:18

We're making it so stringent for them and creating so many expectations for them about what it is to be a clinician and how that we're not actually looking at. Like, how do we, how do we meet these clinicians needs? Right, to be able to help them pay for their student loans, to be able to help them pay for, you know, if they want a house or if they want to travel or whatever it is that they want to do to live their life. Like. We need to be able to create mental health systems that are not just like putting our clinicians on a hamster wheel. You know. It needs to be a way forward that clinicians feel empowered to be able to maximize their profit for all of the work that they've put in, for all of the help that they've done.

Aubrey: 12:09

Right, we want our clinicians to be well-paid and taken care of so that when they show up in the room, that they can be the best supports for the people that they serve and capping income. Right, which is what insurance panels do. They cap our income and making it so that some some clients pay some, some clients pay others. It depends on how much they get with their insurance system. But insurance systems are convoluted and confusing and nobody can figure them out on either side of the fence and everyone ends up frustrated about it and pointing fingers and it creates barriers in the relationship between clinicians and clients, in the relationship between clinicians and clients.

Aubrey: 13:00

So that's why I've already kind of done some research on what this is going to look like and I have not set a date yet, but it probably will be within the next six months that my practice is going to transition to a method called the green bottle method, which is a sliding scale based on people's needs and being able to meet their basic needs, as well as having or not having a certain amount of expendable income.

Aubrey: 13:25

It's also a system that is collaborative between the clinician and the client. It is something that opens conversations rather than closes them, and it will create more accessibility as well as investment in the process. Right, that has been the biggest problem that I've had in my own process, right? Is that when I'm paying $0 every week. As nice as that feels, I have absolutely no reason to implement the things other than like an intrinsic motivation to just want to get better right. I have no external motivators, like financially, that are motivating me, that are saying, hey, I should probably do this because next week I'm going to go and pay another whatever amount, right, and if I'm just in the same place again then what's the point? So creating that financial accountability actually creates incentive for people to put in the work.

Aaron: 14:25

Wow, awesome Congratulations. I definitely speak on behalf of the listenership as well. It's so fun to watch this evolve in real time. You know that is that is really cool, do you? What? Do you what? Do you think the kind of the number one outcome for you and the number one outcome for your clients would be with this transition?

Aubrey: 14:53

The number one outcome for me is that, well, if we go in order of what's going to happen, first, the first thing that's going to happen is that my income is going to drop.

Aubrey: 15:08

I know that for certain because I know that the people that I am currently working with are not going to be able to pay as much as what I'm going to need to in order to be able to scale my business, and so where I'm starting out from is going to be a lower slider, sliding scale than where I intend to go, which is okay, right, I want to serve the clients that I have.

Aubrey: 15:32

I want to stay loyal to them. I have no interest in quote unquote screwing anybody, right, like I don't want to do this in a way that is like schemey or skeezy or anything like that, because that's not why I'm doing this at all. I'm doing this in order to open up accessibility to more people, right, and the way that I see this impacting my clients is that, for the clients who are paying more than they should, they're going to feel relief, right, and for the clients who have been calling me, who have, you know, medicaid or they have other types of insurance that I'm just not in network with, or I cannot currently offer a sliding scale because of the ties that I have to insurance. That is going to change right. That, like my practice, will then actually be able to serve those people. So I will be able to serve a wider range of people by being able to offer a sliding scale. It's really exciting.

Aaron: 16:32

That's, that's awesome and, and I think I think just as far as the quality of what you offer too, because from the from the get-go, you're, you're, you're kind of target targeting and isolating um what and isolating what the client wants out of it, and you're able to directly express, you know, realistic expectations of your services in relation to their needs. If that's the start of the conversation, I mean that's way more.

Aubrey: 17:12

That is such an important part of the conversation. I'm going to make this really quick because we I know we both have to go. So a really important part of the conversation is about diagnosis right. In order to be able to bill insurance, there has to be proof of medical necessity, which means that there needs to be a diagnosis on file for that client. Now, once a client has a diagnosis on file for that client Now, once a client has a diagnosis on file then what happens is that that is now record within their health insurance and it is subject to being scrutinized when they go and look for a life insurance plan. So their life insurance premiums could actually end up higher because of an extended treatment period of mental health related challenges, which is completely the opposite of what, as a clinical field, we're really trying to do.

Aaron: 18:07

Yeah, it's a slippery slope too, especially younger people. You never know what that could potentially hinder you from um you know whether it's a government job or, um you know, application for something. You know that that can come back up. And if it's, if it's something that you know wasn't, especially if it's a inappropriate diagnosis, um you know, just to get the insurance paperwork through, I mean yeah you're fighting the good fight.

Aubrey: 18:40

It takes 90 days to get off of these panels. So I'm working on it and we'll see. We'll see how long it really takes. That's why I said within the next six months, and I just wanted to record this today and make sure that I had it, you know, public and out there, so that I could have something to refer my clients to, so that when they're asking questions and they're like why is this happening? What's happening here? You know that I will explain it to everybody individually, but I just want to make sure that I had something that people could refer to here as well.

Aaron: 19:17

Nice talk about the uh, the self-accountability as well.

Aubrey: 19:22

You just put it out to to the world we gotta, we gotta, we gotta be the first ones when we're the leaders. Right, we gotta put our head right out there on the chopping block.

Aaron: 19:32

Ready, you know yeah, so I'll be here to record it yeah, yeah.

Aubrey: 19:38

So here we are. Um, I'm gonna wrap up for now. This is um bizradious. If anybody is interested, uh, in finding more about me, aubrey baptiste, your host, you can look me up on wwwarttherapynccom and be sure to like and subscribe.