Co-Creating a More Just and Sustainable System for All
Build Better Health is a collectively minded, solutions-focused think tank and incubator founded by independent provider advocates, working to co-create a more just and sustainable healthcare system for all. We promote public health by educating communities and stakeholders about barriers to care, advocating for equitable health system reform, and supporting efforts that expand access to quality healthcare. We recently became a federally recognized 501(c)(3), though we have been organizing as a grassroots coalition since August 2024.
We work in two directions at once. One part of our work holds insurers and the platforms consolidating our field accountable, to the law and to the people they serve. The other builds community-governed alternatives to replace what that system keeps trying to block.
One branch to hold the system accountable. Another to build the replacement it keeps trying to block.
Build Better HealthOur Structure
Build Better Health is the home for two interconnected initiatives, each addressing a different part of the same problem.
Mental Health Insurance Reform Task Force (MHIRTF)
MHIRTF is our education, research, and advocacy arm. A national, provider-led coalition coordinating state and federal strategy around parity enforcement and vertical consolidation, with membership in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Our work runs on two pillars. The first is enforcing the law, moving states up a progressive advocacy ladder from documentation toward a statutory reimbursement floor. The second is addressing the consolidation that lets insurers own the networks, the platforms, and the rules all at once. We organize as a hub-and-branch network, with state leads carrying the work in their communities and a shared national hub keeping strategy aligned.
Learn about MHIRTF
People's Solidarity Fund (PSF)
PSF is our cooperative-building arm: a community-governed, direct-pay model in development, incubated by Build Better Health. Designed to redirect money away from extractive middlemen and back into affordable care, and to give communities the infrastructure to fund, organize, and govern their own access to care.
Learn about PSFHow We're Organized
We are a circle, not a hierarchy. We are deliberately decentralizing responsibility so that the work never depends on any single person.
Founding Board
A founding board of provider advocates holds our governance and stewards the mission.
Advisory Board
An advisory board brings additional expertise from policy, healthcare, and community leadership.
National Coordinators
A small team sharing coordination across the coalition, supporting state leads and keeping national strategy and state-level work moving together.
Federal Policy Team
A dedicated team tracking federal developments so the coalition stays informed and ready to respond, integrated with our state-level work.
Subcommittees
Three working groups where members take the work deeper: Education, Legal (combining legislation and litigation), and Innovation.
State Leads
Our on-the-ground representatives, now active across all 50 states, serving as the bridge between the national coalition and providers in their communities.
Why We Exist
The crisis in care was not caused by individual clinicians, overwhelmed clients, or a lack of resilience. It was built. We focus on the structural failures behind the breakdown: parity violations, suppressed reimbursement, carve-outs, vertical consolidation, and administrative tactics like forced credentialing, prior authorizations, clawbacks, and delayed payments.
What looks like billing policy on paper often works in practice as a system of access restriction, shaping who gets care, how long they get it, and whether providers can afford to stay in network at all.
We exist to challenge those conditions directly and to help build a behavioral health system that protects care, restores fairness, and serves people before profit.
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 shareholders.
Access
Building new infrastructure for care so that the system that emerges is fairer, more sustainable, and centered on people.
Fairness
Grounded in mutual respect, structural integrity, and collective empowerment for providers, clients, and communities alike.
Community Power
Systems shaped by the people who use and deliver care, not by insurance executives or shareholders.
Our Story
We Started Here
As clinicians and practice owners, we kept running into the same mounting challenges: parity laws that went unenforced, reimbursement that no longer made the math work, clawbacks, and administrative barriers that wore providers down and pushed care out of reach. In August 2024, we organized to do something about it, beginning with a survey asking providers across the field what they were up against.
A National Coalition
What began as a Kentucky effort grew, state by state, into a national coalition with members and state leads across all fifty states. Along the way we built a full national strategy, including the progressive advocacy ladder that helps each state see its next step, and we became a federally recognized 501(c)(3). The Mental Health Insurance Reform Task Force became one of two initiatives under Build Better Health.
Building Something Better
Through that work, we realized reform is only one piece of the picture. The same pressures squeezing behavioral health are rising across all of healthcare, and we came to believe part of the answer is to think creatively and return to healthcare's roots: the community-governed models that served people before the system drifted toward extraction. That belief became the People's Solidarity Fund. What started as a fight to make insurance accountable has grown into a movement to build something better, together.
Ready to Get Involved?
Join providers, advocates, and community members across all 50 states who are working together to fix what's broken, and build something better.
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