Do research into starting my own private practice

I asked around at a staff meeting yesterday about some things required to get on insurance panels, and learned that you can apply on the health insurance companies website to get listed on their panel, but 99% of the time you get rejected or they say we are not taking providers at this time and you apply over and over again until accepted.

I’ve been working at my practice as a therapist for 4 years now. I make them large sums of money and work very hard. The trade off is that I get to help a large number of people, make my own schedule and have a lot of freedom. The downside is that they keep the bulk of the money and I’m perpetually poor.

I’ve been strongly considering moving somewhere with a lower cost of living and trying to open my own practice. The problem is that I don’t know a lot about how to bill insurance companies, and there is the fear that I will not be able to drum up enough business to keep my family afloat while trying to repay loans to start the business (to rent office space, etc.).

While I’ve been pondering this a lot lately, I fortuitously just got an unsolicited postcard in the mail about how to start your own practice. I will try to investigate this in the near future and see where that leads me.