Insurance accepted
Using Aetna at The Denning Center
The practice is in network with Aetna, so sessions are billed to Aetna directly rather than paid up front and claimed back. What you personally owe still depends on your policy.
What being in network with Aetna actually means
It means two things. Claims go to Aetna from this office, so you are not fronting the full fee and waiting on a reimbursement. And the amount Aetna pays is set by a contracted rate rather than by the practice’s private fee, which is usually the larger of the two savings.
What it does not mean is that your sessions are free, or even necessarily cheap. Aetna administers a very wide range of plans — employer PPOs and EPOs, HMO products, student health plans, Medicare Advantage — and they do not share a single benefit design. Two people can both hand over an Aetna card and owe completely different amounts.
The three things that decide what you pay
Your deductible. If your plan applies a deductible to outpatient behavioral health and you have not met it, you pay the contracted rate for each session until you have. That figure is often close to the full fee, and it surprises people in January more than at any other time of year.
Your copay or coinsurance. A copay is a flat amount per session. Coinsurance is a percentage of the contracted rate, so it moves with the session length — which matters if we are doing longer Accelerated Resolution Therapy sessions.
Whether behavioral health is carved out. Some Aetna plans administer mental health benefits through a separate arrangement with its own network and its own authorisation rules. Your medical benefits being fine tells you nothing about that.
What we do before your first session
Tell us the plan name on your card when you get in touch — just the plan name, never the member ID over email or a web form. We check the current position with Aetna and tell you what we are told before you commit to anything. If the answer is that you would be better off self-paying, you will hear that too.
If insurance turns out not to be the right route
Private pay is $130 for a standard 50-minute session, with no claim, no authorisation and no session limit set by anybody else. For some people that genuinely works out better, and we will say so if it does. Full fees and the questions to ask your plan.
Written and clinically reviewed by Jim Denning, MA, LPC. Last reviewed 1 September 2026.
We review health content at least once a year, and sooner when clinical guidance, fees, insurance, or crisis information changes. Tell us if something here looks wrong.
Questions
Aetna, specifically
Do you take Aetna Medicare Advantage?
Medicare Advantage plans are contracted separately from commercial Aetna plans, so the answer is plan-specific rather than a blanket yes. Give us the plan name and we will check it rather than guess.
My Aetna card says my therapy benefit is administered by someone else.
That is a carve-out, and it is common. It means the network and the authorisation rules belong to that administrator rather than to Aetna itself. Tell us the name printed on the back of the card and we will work from that.
Tell us your plan and we will check it
Send the plan name — not the member ID — and we will verify where you stand before you commit to anything.