Over the counter cold-and-flu remedy: $5.99.
Trip to the doctor’s office: $20.
Extra time to bend your doctor’s ear: $1,500 a year and up.
Primary care physicians are increasingly offering exclusivity to those willing to pay for it.
These practices, known as concierge, boutique or retainer practices, typically charge annual fees that range from $1,500 to $10,000 or more. The fee allows the businesses to prosper with a far smaller roll of patients than has become the norm under the traditional system.
Patients like the extra attention and lack of crowded waiting rooms. Doctors say they need alternatives to a payment system that forces them to cram their schedule with appointments.
Our primary care physician relocated to a relatively inexpensive part of Pittsburgh suburbia and set up on her own because she was tired of the pressures that went with group practice. We have a 25-minute drive to get to her, but when we do, she usually spends 30-40 minutes with us and there’s rarely more than one other person waiting to be seen. And all this without any sort of retainer. I don’t know how she manages it, but we’re very grateful.
I heard several years ago of doctors who had stopped accepting insurance payments – and the reduced expenses they had as result (from not having to have personnel to do all the paperwork) meant that they could charge about half of what was the going rate in other practices.
Sadly, Hakkatan, a whole bunch more physicians and dentists stopped accepting insurance payments, and forgot to charge their patients less – in fact, now charge more. Altruism of any sort is not considered “normal” practice.
And in other “good news”, Medicare is now refusing to pay for consultation fee to specialists. Everyone knows the first visit for a patient referred to a specialist is much more intensive. There were codes for visits that distinguished such visits from follow up visit. Medicare just decided whimsically ignore this reality and say, “Nope, you can’t use consult codes.”
I have heard that all the specialists in a given specialty that has a high Medicare population in the city almost an hour away are refusing to see new patients and people there are driving here to see our one specialist in that specialty who was already over-stretched.
Medicare cuts to pay for Obamacare? The death panel rhetoric is now seeming less hyperbolic.
Yes, cash practice is the wave of the future if you can pay. but unfortunately it is forbidden for Medicare so if you are over sixty-five you can’t get it and less doctors will see you. This is what the voters asked for. enjoy.