Build Better Health

Build Better Health is a provider-led, community-driven coalition of advocates working to fix what’s broken in health care, and build more mutually respectful systems. We came together to confront a system that repeatedly fails patients, burns out clinicians, and refuses to hold itself accountable.

We don’t believe that reform alone is enough. But we also understand that building outside the system doesn’t entirely replace the need for enforcement. That’s why Build Better Health creates space for both strategies to thrive side by side.

Our Structure

Build Better Health supports two interconnected efforts, each addressing different pieces of the problem:

Mental Health Insurance Reform Task Force

Founded in 2024, the Mental Health Insurance Reform Task Force is the legal and policy arm of BBH. It’s a national coalition of mental health advocates focused on:

  • Holding insurance companies accountable to federal and state parity laws

  • Protecting mental health providers from exploitation and clawbacks

  • Investigating insurance lobbying, healthcare monopolies, and suppression of access

  • Empowering both clinicians and the public to challenge systems of harm

We use legislative advocacy, litigation, education, and innovation to confront the policies and profit structures undermining care and to reimagine how enforcement, oversight, and community-led healthcare can work.

People’s Solidarity Fund

The People’s Solidarity Fund is the mutual aid and direct-pay cooperative branch of BBH. This initiative brings together communities, clinicians, and partners to build an ethical, nonprofit alternative to the insurance model.

PSF is building the groundwork for a community-governed healthcare system that:

  • Centers transparency, integrity, and collective care

  • Redirects money away from exploitative middlemen and back into care

  • Equips communities with the infrastructure to fund, organize, and govern their own mental health access

What started as a fight to make insurance systems more accountable has grown into a movement to replace them with something better.

Our Vision

We believe the people most impacted by a system should lead its transformation. We believe healthcare should be shaped by providers, clients, and communities, not by insurance executives or corporate shareholders.

Build Better Health is a new infrastructure for care, built on mutual respect, structural integrity, and collective empowerment.

Mental Health Insurance Reform Task Force (MHIRTF) is addressing long-standing and worsening problems in the behavioral health care system, particularly those caused or exacerbated by the insurance industry. These include:

• Parity violations, where insurers fail to provide mental health coverage equal to medical or surgical care
• Low and unjust reimbursement rates, especially for independent and small practice providers that lead to network inadequacy
• The rise of carve-outs and vertical monopolies that limit access, reduce pay, and create confusion and barriers for both clients and clinicians
• Prior authorizations, clawbacks, and delayed payments that interfere with timely and ethical care
• Workforce burnout, high turnover, and a shrinking number of providers willing to stay in insurance networks due to the poor conditions

These challenges matter because they directly affect whether people can access the care they need when they need it. Clients are being left without essential services, especially in rural areas. Providers are leaving the field or avoiding insurance entirely because they cannot sustain their practices under current conditions. Communities are suffering the consequences of a system that prioritizes profit over people, and we believe it is possible to build something better.

By confronting these systemic failures head-on, MHIRTF is working to protect access to care, restore fairness, and help build a system that works better for everyone involved.