It was revealed in recent news that in Michigan at some doctor’s offices, patients will need to present and utilize their credit cards before getting any medical care. A fairly new internet based medical payment program permits medical providers to secure a credit card before medical help is provided.
Touting the fact that it is a way of making sure medical providers get paid while keeping administrative costs down, the company has been around since 2008. It works like this: upon arriving at their doctors office, patients are told by their medical care provider what the maximum amount a particular procedure will most likely cost. The patient slides their credit card, gets the procedure done, and strolls out of the office with a receipt and a detailed slip of services provided.
At this point the provider will charge the patient’s insurance company. The insurance company will inform the provider how much of the work is covered; the balance remaining is charged on the card. If a deductible has not been met, then the entire price of the procedure is charged.
As health care costs increase, more and more pressure has been placed on medical patients to pay their bills in the form of co pays, out of pocket expenses, and higher deductibles. With this increasing stress, delinquent and unpaid bills have become huge issues for medical providers.
Patient’s health care payments are now over three hundred billion dollars a year, and that number is supposed to balloon up to twice that number by 2015. From this number, fifty to sixty billion dollars of current health care debts go unpaid. The program has been shown to reduce delinquent accounts by up to eighty percent.
But some financial experts remain skeptical. The issue of patients who don’t pay off their balance each month hasn’t yet been resolved, and this is not factoring in the problem of a patient not having a credit card.
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