This project started for two central reasons. First, because so many of us at ProPublica had experienced this problem at a personal level:
In passionate staff meetings, it became clear: Not only was the country suffering a crisis of mental health — loneliness, substance abuse, teen anxiety and depression. But we were living and breathing an underlying crisis of access, one not being adequately addressed by the government, the courts or anyone else in power.
Second, after spending 2023 reporting on health insurance denials, we heard from hundreds of people through our carefully crafted call for tips who were experiencing health insurance induced barriers to mental health care. Patients, their family members, providers and even insurance industry insiders spoke with us about companies interfering with and preventing access to critical mental health care.
We knew that covering this in a one-off manner was not sufficient. We needed to devote an entire team to it.
Our team spent a year exposing a mental health care system that had been captured by profit-seeking insurance companies.
The reporters crowdsourced thousands of tips by meeting people with mental illness where they are, including through creating a reported out guide on navigating health insurance denials and distributing pamphlets with the information to thousands of behavioral health facilities across the country. These tips directly led to reporters obtaining explosive internal company documents and reviewing thousands of pages of lawsuit filings to identify the doctors doling out denials. The resulting stories included shattering and intimate stories of patients for whom care was prematurely cut off, leading to devastating consequences. Their resulting series, “America’s Mental Barrier,” is one of the first nationwide examinations of how insurance companies interfere with access to necessary mental health care.
