The directory problem: ghost networks

If you have ever called a clinic your insurance listed and reached a disconnected number, a practice that wasn’t taking patients, or a door that was never open — it wasn’t you. It was the directory.

Researchers have a name for what you ran into: a ghost network — a provider directory full of listings that look real and lead nowhere.

What the studies found

• U.S. Senate Finance Committee (2023): Secret shoppers calling Medicare Advantage mental-health listings got an appointment only 18% of the time. More than 80% of the listings were ghosts — wrong, unreachable, or not accepting patients.
• New York Attorney General (2023): Of 396 mental-health providers sampled across 13 health plans, only 14% could offer an appointment. 86% were ghosts.
• U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office of Inspector General (2025): On average, 55% of behavioral-health providers listed in Medicare Advantage networks were inactive — and most of those inactive listings should never have appeared at all.

Why the directories stay wrong

Insurance directories are assembled from data nobody is responsible for keeping true. Clinics move, leave networks, and fill their panels; the listings don’t follow. Federal law already requires plans to verify their directories — and a new law passed in 2026 goes further, with public accuracy scores for Medicare Advantage plans starting in 2029. Until the plans fix their maps, patients keep paying the price in dead ends, at the exact moment they can least afford them.

What we do differently

Depression Care Finder is being built the other way around: from the clinic outward.

• Every clinic can claim its own listing and confirm, in its own words, what it treats, which insurance it accepts, and whether it is taking new patients.
• Every claimed listing shows when it was last confirmed — and listings nobody has claimed are labeled unverified, so you always know how much to trust what you’re reading.
• Rankings are never for sale. A clinic can present itself better; it cannot buy its way above another.

It’s slower than scraping a database. It’s also the only way the map ends up telling the truth.

Sources: U.S. Senate Finance Committee secret shopper study, May 2023; New York State Attorney General, December 2023; HHS Office of Inspector General data brief, October 2025.

See also our Resources page.