u/Far_Worry5325

As for Harry and the CEOs behind this decision:

May your smoke alarm forever chirp at 2:38 a.m.

May every sensitive email you send accidentally hit “Reply All” to the entire company.

May your Zoom freeze the exact moment you try to sound important…always on your worst angle.

May your office chair slowly sink every time you sit down.

May your favorite restaurants flatten their menu and announce all portions are now “standard.”

May every pasta dish you order be overcooked and every fry lukewarm and unsalted.

May your GPS loudly reroute you to the wrong exit 8 minutes early during the best part of your favorite song.

May you step in a cold wet spot wearing your last clean socks five minutes before every important event of your life.

May you someday hear right before surgery:
“We’ve decided all operating room roles are clinically equivalent.”
…and then the anesthesia kicks in.

May your Harvard degree, M.D., and J.D., Harry, someday be treated as an “optional enhancement” rather than something worth compensating differently.

And finally, may three ghosts visit you one night like a reimbursement-cutting Christmas Carol.

One to show you therapists before venture capital…hopeful, energized, believing they could build meaningful lives helping people.

One to show you the present…therapists eating cold Chipotle between sessions, documenting at midnight, drowning in student loans while apologizing to clients for systems they never created.

And one to show you the future… private practice gone, mental healthcare swallowed by VC firms, while you sit alone in a luxury penthouse refreshing quarterly earnings as your $400 out-of-network therapist on Zoom quietly says:

“funny enough, Harry…I used to be on Alma.”

…and the room goes silent except for a smoke alarm chirping somewhere in the distance..

And just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly 🦋.”

To all my beloved colleagues affected by this decision: I know many of us feel defeated today. I barely slept last night myself. But this morning, I woke up seeing the silver lining. Let this become a lesson in wisdom, not defeat.

They made this decision expecting us to quietly submit. Instead, let us rise from the ashes like a phoenix.

There is power in numbers. If we stay divided, nothing changes. If we organize, we have leverage.

One idea: For one month, we collectively stop billing through Alma and transition clients either to our direct contracts or to other platforms we already use. Whether that starts now or July 15th, we can be flexible…but united.

Yes, there may be short-term financial pain. But long-term: Independence. Stability. Self-respect. No more dependence on VC-backed corporations deciding our worth overnight.

I have helped organize collective advocacy efforts before and won. I am more than willing to help organize again if enough colleagues want to stand together.

And maybe it’s time these corporations learn something from clinicians too: We may not have gone to business school, but we do know boundaries. We teach our clients every day not to stay in relationships built on fear, silence, dependency, and loss of self-worth. Maybe it’s time we practice what we preach.

Let this be a lesson to the industry: Clinicians are not powerless. And we are done confusing survival with loyalty.
Who is in? 💪🏻😊

What bothers me most is the lack of transparency. Last month Alma emailed me saying “Aetna” requested client notes. I checked the list, 2 clients weren’t even Aetna (they were UHC/Carelon). When I questioned it, they admitted it was actually Alma’s own internal review and said they “made a mistake.”
So when these new emails blame “Aetna,” I honestly don’t fully buy it anymore.

At this point, more clinicians need to reconsider these platforms.