Katie Lyon-Pingree spent three years watching paperwork accumulate in a black bin on her dining room counter—insurance claims, ambulance bills, and hospital discharge papers tracking her son’s mental health crisis. Despite every effort to get her 18-year-old son, Matthew Pingree, the care he needed, the system failed him. In 2021, Matthew died by suicide. Now, Pingree is fighting to close gaps in New Hampshire’s mental health insurance coverage to prevent other families from facing the same struggles.
When Matthew was 14, Pingree knew something was wrong. In 2019, he confided in his school psychologist that he had made a plan to take his own life. What followed was a series of hospital admissions, therapy appointments, and mounting medical bills. Matthew made another suicide attempt, which his parents managed to prevent. Eventually, the Pingrees sent Matthew to a residential treatment facility in Utah—a decision they had to navigate entirely on their own. During their first visit, Matthew gave them “the cold shoulder” and walked out after just five minutes. Pingree believes that wraparound services, available in New Hampshire but unknown to her at the time, could have allowed Matthew to stay home surrounded by family and community support.
New Hampshire offers Families and Systems Together (FAST Forward), a wraparound service designed to support families when young people are experiencing serious mental and behavioral health challenges, providing coordinated care from school counselors and therapists to caregiver respite and individualized plans. However, private health insurance carriers are not required to fund these services. When families don’t qualify for Medicaid waivers—which require a child’s condition to be severe enough to risk hospitalization—the state spends approximately $2 million each year from New Hampshire’s general fund.
Senate Bill 498, sponsored by Senator Regina Birdsell, aims to close this gap by requiring health insurance carriers in New Hampshire to contribute a proportional share to fund wraparound services. Pingree plans to testify at the bill’s public hearing. “Nobody should have to do this,” she said. “I didn’t even know the services had existed until after he died.”
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.concordmonitor.com/2026/02/10/mental-health-insurance-gap/