1 reply to this topic

[stocks]

On a wall inside Dr. Brian Forrest’s medical office in a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, is something you won’t find in most doctors’ offices, a price list:

Office visit $49

Wrist splint $41

Pap-smear $51.

Those are the prices patients pay for the services, and they pay on the spot. Forrest doesn’t take insurance. If he did, the prices would be far higher and not nearly as transparent. He says listing prices up front is about trying to do business in a straightforward way, “like a Jiffy Lube.”


He’s negotiated deals with a lab company to reduce his patients’ costs for tests. The lab loves being paid on the spot for services rendered and allows Forrest to charge his patients $30, for example, for a prostate-cancer screening test that the company bills to an insurer at $184. “For specialists, cash in the hand is better than a bigger amount charged to insurance,” he says. He’s found other doctors happy to join in, such as a cardiologist who’s willing to give discounts of 80 to 90 percent to his patients if he’s paid cash up front.

“The discovery I made was that by getting rid of administrative, bureaucratic hassles, I was able to do very well financially and at the same time have high patient satisfaction and good quality of care,” he says. Even more surprising, most of his patients are not wealthy. Half have no insurance, and another 15 percent are on Medicare. His patients include homeless people who have no other access to care and wealthy people who like the idea of spending more time with their doctor.


Take knee replacement surgery, which in the United States might cost $50,000. A patient with insurance might have to pay an $8,000 deductible. In Costa Rica, the entire procedure costs closer to $11,500. “You can stay at home and pay an $8,000 deductible, or you can go to Costa Rica with your wife and spend three weeks recovering,” Stephano says. “This is more of a cost-conscious, consumer-driven approach.”

And the quality of care abroad can often rival or surpass that in the United States, she says. For instance, the Food and Drug Administration only approved hip resurfacing surgery—an alternative to hip replacement—in 2006, which means U.S. doctors have been performing it for at most four years. Doctors in India have been performing the procedure for more than a decade.



http://www.weeklysta...es/cash-doctors

[Rogerdodger]

Try PriceDoc.com