Insurance - Love It Or Hate It?

Insurance is one of those thing we all want and need, but it’s easy to see the flaws in the current insurance system.

My dad was a doctor. I remember as a kid watching patients visit with him, go to the front desk and his receptionist would say, “That’ll be five dollars, please.”

The patient would pull out a 5 dollar bill, or five one dollar bills, and their visit would be paid for. It was simple. My dad had two staff members: the receptionist and the nurse. It was all very simple and straight forward.

Overhead costs were very low. There was minimal reporting of   this and that. It was not complicated.

In the 80’s he decided to get out of medicine and go into orcharding as the complications of practicing medicine had gotten too overwhelming.

I practiced for many years with one of my brothers, Randy. He also was a physician and we shared interests in the kind of medicine we practiced. But by the late 90’s, he left medicine because, in part, of the challenges dealing with bureaucracy and the increasing paperwork that was required.

If you think it was bad then, check it out now.

I won’t bore you with a list of the challenges of having a private practice these days, but it’s not what it used to be and, in this sense, it used to be a lot better.

This is the reason hardly anybody goes into private practice any more. It’s too complicated. Especially dealing with insurance companies. An office has to have specialists who know how to deal with insurance companies as it’s not always straight forward.

After years of discussing whether we should get out of accepting insurance due to the costs and complications involved, we finally decided last year that the time had come.

Our concern in making that change: You!

We understand how people are dependent to some degree on the insurance they carry. And it costs them a lot of money, even if it comes with the job as a benefit. If they didn’t have to pay for the insurance, they could make more money personally.

We are used to having insurance pay for our office appointments.

What happens when an office no longer accepts an insurance?

The challenges to our patients are obvious.

BUT:   We want you to be aware that it might not be as much of a problem as you might have thought.

What it looks like: My doctor no longer accepts insurance therefore my insurance will no longer cover any of the costs associated with going to that clinic.

The reality: It’s quite different. Insurance will usually still pay a pretty good chunk of the doctor’s bill.

The way it works is this: You do have to pay for the office visit. But you can then send the bill to your insurance company and they generally pay a percentage of the bill. Our experience is that they often pay 60-70% of the total.

Which means it is not nearly as bad as it might appear.

There are some forms of insurance that will not pay anything. A good example of this would be Medicare. And, again, we understand some of the challenge this brings. But for our Medicare patients, this is nothing new as we have not accepted Medicare for over 20 years. I won’t even begin to try to explain some of the issues we face as a small clinic dealing with Medicare.

You are important to us.

We want you to do well!

If there are questions or particular hardships at a given time, please talk with Nate here in the office and he can help to provide some insight and direction.

Over the years we have greatly appreciated our interactions with so many of you. We are here to help in as best we can.