I am sorry, scorpiosis. Yes it is not easy to find a responsible, competent therapist, at all. I would think cancelling/not showing 3 times in a row is a big red flag that something is not working well in that practice, be it the T or the office staff. I imagine you cannot contact the T directly if you have communicated with the office about this.

I have only seen private practice therapists who are out-of-network and manage their own business alone longer term but consulted with some within my insurance's network and I had generally worse experiences in a few ways with the latter. Submitting claims and getting reimbursements with my last T (I realize more and more how lucky I was finding him) was pretty easy. He would email me an invoice whenever I wanted and I had an insurance form filled out in my files - I would just need to sign the form electronically and upload to my insurance portal together with the invoice from the T. It literally takes 5 minutes. I also set it up in a way that I would submit claims about once a month (it could have been more frequent as well) and then I had a stead flow of reimbursement. Of course it also depends on the insurance company - my current one is particularly good but my previous one was a lot of trouble and very slow.

My first T screwed up about scheduling repeatedly, but the other way around... he would not take note of my in-advance cancellations and would call me during the expected appoint time, where I was. I got really upset when that happened 3 times and told him in a not-so-nice manner. He also often made mistakes putting his part on the insurance form - I had to bring them to him on paper and then snail mail because he was not willing to send electronic invoices. Would also argue with me about the appointment dates on the form because obviously he made no decent records. He had also proven quite incompetent in many other ways and in retrospect I think dealing with the scheduling and forms was actually a good sign that he was not very responsible managing his business and way of working.

If you had higher hopes for this T for some reason, perhaps it is indeed a good idea to give her a change to at least explain... *** happens sometimes and not always an good predictor of future outcomes. Handling a new client this way would be a bit stinky for me though.