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Alma and Headway show you one number: what the network pays you. They don't show you what the payer contracted to pay your colleagues who went direct — or the spread within that payer's network. Texas Transparency in Coverage data for UHC and Cigna shows why that missing number matters, and gives you a way to evaluate it.
Cigna's aggregate Texas 90837 data shows psychologists below master's-level therapists at the median — $85 vs. $96. That looks like a credential penalty. It isn't. It's a network-tier composition effect, and knowing which Cigna network product name is on your contract determines which number actually applies to you.
Alma, Headway, and Grow Therapy don't publish their rates. CMS-mandated payer files do. Here's what direct-contract Texas 90837 rates look like across four major payers — and how to use that data to evaluate your managed network contract.
A $15/session rate cut sounds small. At 20 sessions a week, it's $15,600 a year. Here's how to run the break-even math on Alma, Headway, or Grow Therapy against a direct insurance contract — using actual Texas payer benchmarks.
Most rate-review letters fail because they ask for a better rate without giving the payer anything to anchor a response to. A letter that cites the payer's own federal filing changes that. Here's the full sequence, and a complete letter you can adapt.
UHC and BCBS Texas both show a $110 median for Texas 90837 — but the distributions differ. BCBS Texas's lower p25 floor makes it the likelier source of below-market contracts. Here's what the federal filings show side by side.
