Skip Insurance, Specialists Will See Patients for Less Than $100

Ellen McKnight - Brave Goddess of Medicine

Twitter & LinkedIn: @EllenMcKnightMD

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Health’s cartel – especially the part with hospitals and insurers – have frustrated doctors enough for some of them to risk payment only directly from their patients.  Most practitioners have abandoned this independent model, tired of the burdens of running their own business or enticed by the lower working hours or potential of camaraderie as an employee in a hospital system.  But Covid’s rigid protocols and – even before then – sham peer review in hospitals and punitive credentialing by insurance companies – have proven the last straw holding physicians back from re-entering the traditional, often cash-based, market.  Why should patients care?

Families should care about the nature of the physician business because of the differing outcomes dependent on the doctor’s employment situation.  Hospitalists cannot give patients sufficient time to diagnose what most of them have now:  chronic illness.  In hospital systems, patients get shortened visits and haphazard prescriptions.  Not so in independent practices, at least those seeking more payment in cash versus insurance reimbursement.  When doctors can charge their own prices – either monthly or per service – they can give patients the extra time needed to arrive at a proper diagnosis, allowing doctors to once again practice the art of medicine in creatively dealing with ever more complicated diseases.  That’s why patients should care.  And more specialists should heed Dr. McKnight’s lessons to gauge whether this path will improve their practice.

Dr. McKnight, a rheumatologist, has suggestions for other demerits of the cartel, which abused us not just during Covid’s hysteria but even before the pandemic.  Helplessly standing by as chronic disease has exploded from 10% in 1990 to 50% in 2010, Americans all have to care about upgrading the health market.