Cash Only Health Care
Physicians are more strained than ever before to stay in business and are searching for new models to help them succeed. Physicians’ offices spend between up to $30 billion dollars a year in administrative overhead trying to get paid by insurance companies.
Due to the increased burden of administrative overhead and cuts in payments for services, many physicians are weighing the benefits of cash-only practices — meaning they would stop accepting any form of insurance and leave patients to seek reimbursement from insurance companies themselves.
Cash only is a type of payment where the patient’s own resources pay for the care. It is contract between the patient and the physician. Individuals pay for care with personal funds, health saving accounts, and other funds.
Cash only is the basis upon which the healthcare financing system began. Patients paid physicians a fee-for-service. In its purest sense, the Cash Only model includes only the physician and patient in the exchange of compensation for medical care provided. Over the years as healthcare financing arrangements have changed, entities paying a fee-for-service includes all payers-public and private. Recently, the healthcare industry has referred to physician practices that do not accept health insurance as cash-only practices or Cash only offices. Cash only vastly reduces the traditional overhead expenses by not having to bill and abide by contractual requirements of third party payers. There are already millions of Americans who cannot afford private health insurance and have Medicaid coverage. Others self-insure due to their financial resources being such that they can pay out-of-pocket for their medical expenses.
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House Calls
A house call, or Physician house call, is an act of customer service where the doctors goes to the consumers home, rather than the consumer visiting the suppliers place of business. House calls are most often associated with doctor house calls. There are still doctors making house calls.
The physician-led multidisciplinary team provides comprehensive, patient-centered care for any condition, from the simple problems to the very complex, in the patient’s own environment. Thanks to modern technology and our sophisticated, multi-faceted delivery system, we can do more tests and procedures in our patient’s home or place of business than other primary care physicians do in their office.
House call doctors are equipped to perform most procedures normally performed in a medical office. House call doctors utilize electronic medical records and will coordinate home health and hospice services, mobile imaging services, durable medical equipment services, laboratory services, and specialist referral services.
House call doctors acts as the primary care physician or as augmentation to or as an interim physician to the patients’ present medial team. Doctor’s House calls provide post hospital stabilization service to physicians, insurance plans, and hospitals to mitigate hospital re-admissions.
