In 2023, my family had CHAMPVA coverage through the VA and needed mental-health care for our kids. We learned very quickly that having coverage did not mean we could actually use it.
Provider after provider told us they did not take CHAMPVA. The reasons were real and repetitive: too much paperwork, reimbursement rates that were too low, credentialing that moved too slowly. Every explanation made sense from the provider's side. None of it changed the fact that our kids still needed care.
The VA had done its part on paper. The coverage existed. But coverage that no one will accept isn't coverage. It's a document.
Eventually, I said what felt like the simplest solution left: I would start a company, learn how to bill CHAMPVA, and hire a therapist so our kids could finally get the care they needed. At that moment, I was trying to solve the problem directly in front of me.
My wife asked the question that changed what ValorWell would become: “Who would we be if we just did this for ourselves?”
That was the line between an idea for our family and the company we actually built. ValorWell may have been born because our children needed care, but when we started the company in 2023, it was never meant to belong only to us. From the beginning, the goal was to make the same path available to every family hitting the wall we had just hit.
So we built the therapist network and the operational and billing infrastructure around CHAMPVA with that larger mission already in place. The problem was not that the benefit did not exist. The problem was that the systems around the benefit made it difficult for providers to participate and difficult for families to turn coverage into an appointment.
As ValorWell grew, the work became bigger than CHAMPVA. We had learned how to make one VA-related coverage pathway more usable, so we started asking whether the same approach could help veterans using VA Community Care.
In 2024, we started trying to integrate with VA Community Care, or VACCN. Veterans could be authorized for outside care and still struggle to get an appointment. Therapists were dealing with many of the same kinds of friction we had already seen: credentialing, reimbursement, paperwork, and operational complexity on the provider side of the system.
We kept working on it. But VACCN proved much harder to integrate with than CHAMPVA. That taught us something important: some gaps can be fixed by building better infrastructure around the coverage. Some gaps are in the design of the system itself.
That distinction changed the model. If the gap was operational, ValorWell could work inside the existing coverage system and make it easier to use. But if a veteran was still unable to reach treatment because the existing system had not produced care, we needed a way to keep that person from simply waiting while the larger problem remained unresolved.
That is why we started the ValorWell Foundation. It is not meant to replace VA coverage or build a parallel system for everyone. It exists to bridge the gap when a veteran who should have access to care still cannot get seen. The Foundation pays qualified therapists directly so treatment can happen while the harder problem is still being worked on.
Today, the model works from both directions. ValorWell works inside VA-related coverage systems to make the care the VA says is available actually usable. The Foundation covers therapy when those systems still leave a veteran without treatment. And what we learn from both sides helps us understand where the system itself still needs to change.
Our children were the reason we started looking for a way through. The decision not to stop with our own family is the reason ValorWell exists.