Wait, you mean a direct financial relationship between the provider and recipient of services?
That’d be, like, capitalism, man:
A different kind of doctor’s office: Patients pay directly, keeping insurance out of it
That’s how you fix the “healthcare system”. It doesn’t need to be a system at all. A market would work. Costs would go down cutting out insurance and government.
January 26th, 2016 at 6:41 pm
Just think how good it could be if we just used the free market and on top of that didn’t have any individual debt. It could be very similar to freedom, very similar indeed.
Next time you make an appointment for an office visit tell them you want to pay cash…they love it. Ask if they have a cash payers discount, many do.
And cash docs don’t ask stuff like “how many guns do you have?”
January 26th, 2016 at 8:52 pm
Great in theory and I hope we can head in that direction. The roadblocks? Gov itself, namely medicare and Medicaid; that is a powerful narcotic to wean people off of. This area of Fla is mostly two groups, old people, mostly retirees from elsewhere, and young ones who are mostly underemployed and relatively low-paid, so it’ll be especially tough here.
A few years ago, a young and strongly anti-socialist doc tried being a private doctor; pay him a fixed amount per year and he’s available whenever and for whatever you need, no gov programs and no insurance (pre 0-care). I loved it and him but not enough clients took the deal for him to continue, so he left town last year, presumably for an area with a little more economic middle ground.
Also, contrary to the “cash discount” thought, right now if you self-pay, you pay full retail which providers have learned to inflate because insurance knocks it down to an “allowed” amount and contrary to a discount, they make up the shortfall on cash buyers so to speak; a totally illogical and backward outcome. It will be hard to wean them off that habit too.
The best thing would obviously be to kill off al third-party payers, but I don’t see that happening with the Medicare/Medicaid programs, so the only ones affected will be those paying their insurance with gov subsidies and while that absolutely needs to happen, I just don’t know if it’s enough to turn this Titanic around before we all go down with the ship and drown.
Best chance though? Trump/Cruz…maybe as I’ve said with some solid help like Paul with his minimalist approach to at least begin to shrink this maximalist monster we have allowed to suck at the public teat for so long. We have to try, or our kids and grandkids will be drowning too.
January 27th, 2016 at 3:21 am
“…cutting out insurance and government.”
Yeah, that’s the problem, right there. They’d have to resort to more petty forms of crime.
January 27th, 2016 at 4:04 am
I’ve paid cash a number of times, and got pretty significant discounts every time. It leads me to wonder, if you did have insurance, paid cash then submitted the claim, would they still play games like allowing only a percentage even though it came in under what they’d allow if the doctor’s office submitted it, that sort of thing?
January 27th, 2016 at 10:35 am
I pay a fee of $65 per month and see my doctor 5X/year- a check up and four office visits. Best deal I’ve made. I suspect that most doctors would love to enter into a deal like that if asked…
January 27th, 2016 at 11:59 am
That’s the big thing, they wanted to “fix” healthcare by making sure that everyone has insurance (or you’ll pay a fee for being alive and not having insurance), but they did nothing to address the affordability of healthcare. Funny that “affordable” is in the name of the act, though. Healthcare costs are basically on a runaway train now, they can charge whatever they want because insurance covers it. Then, insurance passes the buck back to us, so we pay for it. It’s insanity, but that’s how our government has been operating these days.
January 27th, 2016 at 2:43 pm
Right.
So, I tried that the other day at the pharmacy. It was a temporary and cheap prescription at a pharmacy literally across the parking lot from the doctor’s office in a very small town, and I told them I did not want to mess with the insurance as the transaction was small. They wanted my insurance information anyway, saying, “Well, you know, the DEA really likes for us to gather that information?” Weird.
January 27th, 2016 at 7:24 pm
Costs would go down cutting out insurance and government.
We’d still have insurance – but it’d be actual insurance; coverage for unexpected and large costs, paid on an actuarial basis.
Unlike so-called “health insurance” now, which is mostly just a way to pseudo-pre-pay and tax-advantage preventative care and medications that are not unexpected and unlikely.
(Heck, we already have that – ZoomCare and such happily take cash.)