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 and build something better.
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 reform and innovation 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 affordable direct pay care
Equips communities with the infrastructure to fund, organize, and govern their own mental health access
Allows for holistic and preventative care to be covered more effectively
What started as a fight to make insurance systems more accountable has grown into a movement to replace them with something better.
Why We Exist
Profit-driven insurance companies systematically deny or delay medically necessary care, saddle patients with medical debt, maintain noncompliant health plans, and harm clients while exhausting providers through inadequate reimbursement and deliberate administrative burdens. We believe a more mutually respectful system is possible and are willing to work for it.
The Mental Health Insurance Reform Task Force (MHIRTF) was created to confront the systemic insurance practices that delay care, deny coverage, underpay providers, and make ethical treatment harder to sustain.
Our work focuses on the structural failures behind that breakdown: parity violations, inadequate reimbursement, carve-outs and vertical consolidation, and administrative tactics such as prior authorizations, clawbacks, and delayed payments.
What appears on paper as billing and administrative policy often operates in practice as a system of access restriction, affecting treatment timelines, coverage continuity, provider retention, and long-term community care capacity. They shape who gets care, how long they get it, and whether providers can afford to remain in network at all. Clients are delayed, denied, or priced out of treatment that their insurance is required to cover. Providers are pushed into unsustainable conditions and denied adequate pay. Communities lose access.
MHIRTF exists to challenge those conditions directly and help build a behavioral health system that protects care, restores fairness, and serves people before profit. We are here to revolutionize this system!
Together, we can build a mental health care system that is more accessible, more equitable, and more sustainable for the people who depend on it and the professionals who provide it.
"One branch to hold the system accountable. Another to build the replacement it keeps trying to block."
In August 2024, providers, advocates, and legal strategists came together to create the Mental Health Insurance Reform Task Force (MHIRTF), a national coalition confronting parity failures, suppressed reimbursement rates, and the weaponization of prior authorizations and clawbacks.
By March 2025, it became clear that enforcement alone wasn't enough. We expanded to build an ethical, nonprofit, direct-pay cooperative model, the People's Solidarity Fund (PSF), so communities could replicate transparent, member-governed alternatives that serve the whole rather than a select few.
Our Vision
The People closest to the harm Have the insight to lead the repair.
Healthcare should be shaped by providers, clients, and communities, not by insurance executives or corporate shareholders.
Build Better Health is building a new infrastructure for care, grounded in mutual respect, structural integrity, and collective empowerment.
We confront systemic failures, protect access to care, and help build a healthcare system that is fairer, more sustainable, and centered on people rather than profit.
