06/09/2026
Health insurance companies are doing everything, and I mean everything, to control the costs of Healthcare including controlling the providers (with the goal of more profits for their stakeholders). They already pay criminally low rates for mental Healthcare, audit and claw back thousands because they disagree with the care as written on paper, refuse to cover life and quality of life saving care, and make collecting payments from them nearly impossible. Now they get to have and control the database that all providers who desire (need) to accept insurance to remain accessible must participate in. How is this not a monopoly growing to its height of destroying the industry and America's mental wellbeing while they're at it?
If you can afford it, please please please be a self-pay client. Going through insurance puts your care and the career of your therapist at risk.
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Every therapist in this country who takes any insurance awakened to this reality today.
CAQH was a non profit that kept records on all of us for insurers to access- our licenses. Our insurance. Lawsuits. Hours.
As of today it is a profit operation run by United (no) Healthcare. It will be the decider of if you will find a therapist or be funneled into a tech owned company that owns therapists and chews them up and spits them out. ALL the insurers are in on this.
You will.not be referred to someone local. Not to a practice where the staff know who has the skills you need.
Nope. Headway. Alma. The others. The ones who SELL your information before you sign client agreements.
Be careful. Please. Look locally and find someone with an address. And a local number. Because those companies also create fake therapist pages that will refer you back to them.
"We have a big problem
For those who may have missed it, CAQH has been rebranded as DataSpring. I am including some information about the implication of this change, which was shared by an advocacy group, Mental Health Professionals Equity Alliance (MHPEA)
CAQH just rebranded as DataSpring.
What does that mean?
Here’s what actually happened, and why it should alarm every therapist, counselor, and independent provider in this country.
CAQH has existed since 1998 as a nonprofit. Health plans had governance roles through membership, but there was no ownership, no shareholder structure, no fiduciary stake. It functioned as an industry utility. Imperfect, payer-influenced, but nominally neutral.
That ended on January 6, 2026.
CAQH is now formally owned by twelve shareholder companies representing UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, Aetna, Elevance Health, Humana, and a coalition of Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. The board chair is a UnitedHealth Group executive. Every seat at the governance table belongs to a major commercial payer. This is not membership. This is ownership.
Five months later, today, it rebranded as DataSpring.
So why does this matter? Ask yourself why the largest insurance companies in the country would invest in and take formal ownership of a platform that collects data on every provider who bills insurance.
CAQH is not just a credentialing database. It is the mandatory infrastructure that sits upstream of:
✦ Every provider enrollment decision
✦ Every network participation determination
✦ Every directory listing that patients use to find you
✦ Every credentialing process
Owning that platform means owning the chokepoint. It means first access to intelligence on providers across 4.8 million provider records.
For payers already investing in vertically consolidated platforms like Headway and Alma, ownership of the upstream credentialing infrastructure is not a coincidence. It is a strategy.
We have spent years documenting how administrative burden is used as a weapon against independent providers. These are not accidents of a broken system. They are features of a system now owned by the entities who benefit from them.
The nonprofit fiction is gone. The conflict of interest is now structural and on the record.
State insurance commissioners, advocates, and task forces working on MHPAEA enforcement and provider directory accountability need to be asking: can we mandate reliance on a system of record that is owned by the parties we are trying to regulate?
Share this. The behavioral health workforce pipeline is already under attack from every direction. Providers deserve to know who just bought the gate."
