10 Ways Patients Can Save On Health Care Costs

Dr. Richard Reece offers, “10 ways patients can save on health care costs“.

Prudent patients may wish to take advantage of these options while they can, before ObamaCare restricts access to them in the near future.

Doctor, Declare Your Independence

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons offers a way for physicians to observe Independence Day: Sign the Physicians’ Declaration of Independence. It’s a clever takeoff on the document penned by Thomas Jefferson.

Here’s a sample:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that the Physician’s primary responsibility is toward the Patient; that to assure the sanctity of this relationship, payment for service should be decided between Physician and Patient, and that, as in all transactions in a free society, this payment be mutually agreeable. Only such a Financial Arrangement will guarantee the highest level of Commitment and Service of the Physician to the Patient, restrain Outside Influence on Decision-Making, and assure that personal information be kept confidential.

An Alternative to Health Insurance

The Peoria star has published a well-written article about Samaritan Ministries including some quotes from me and my boss, Ted Pittenger. It’s probably the best written and most accurate article about Samaritan I’ve seen yet.

Government Expansion Kills Voluntary Efforts in Alabama

Why give at the office if you’re already “giving” through taxes?

In Alabama, there has been a program called the Alabama Child Caring Program, which gave some measure of health care to children. Funding for the effort comes from donations that have been matched by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama.

Last year, the Alabama Legislature increased the income limits for eligibility in a state program, All Kids, so that more families could receive taxpayer-supplied help.

This week, the voluntary, private-sector effort announced that it will shut its doors.

A representative of Blue Cross pointed to the upside (the state program offers more benefits than the voluntary one), but we’re a poorer society when government programs displace private ones.

Finding Health Care in Charity Clinics

With high unemployment rates meaning increased numbers of the uninsured, charity clinics in Utah are straining to meet demand. The Salt Lake Tribune looks at a few clinics.

Doctor Replaces Medicare with Private Pay Practice

Your a senior citizen and your doctor doesn’t take Medicare? No problem. From the site Take Back Medicine:

Jules Madrigal-Dersch, M.D. is featured on NBC in Austin, TX.  Dr. Madrigal has opted out of Medicare but stills sees Medicare patients at a mutually agreed upon fee, often less than the price of a haircut. Patients over 90 and patients with cancer are seen for free.

Click through to see the video.

Government Health Plan Let You Down? There’s Always Wal-Mart

Government action always has unintended consequences, but some of them are positive – as long as they are brought into effect by the private sector.

In Great Britain, the National Health Service is infamous for denying cancer patients access to the most innovative drugs.  So, ASDA, which is Wal-Mart’s British subsidiary, has decided to sell those drugs at cost.  Competitors quickly followed suit.

Oops: I thought competititive markets don’t work in health care.  I guess they do if the government allows them to.

What’s interesting about this phenomenon is that British cancer patients, who generally have no private insurance, will benefit from price transparency, whereas U.S. cancer patients with private insurance have no similar opportunity.  They still have to launder their claims through an insurer, adding friction and bureaucracy for little value.

But be prepared: If ObamaCare is not repealed, U.S. patients will face similar challenges and opportunities starting in 2014,  because private insurers will become utilities merely delivering limited, government-defined benefits.

The lesson? Even with catastrophically expensive conditions, like lung cancer, competition works.

Getting a Diagnosis Online

From the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis come news of Zipnosis, a company that will write a prescription for you if you have minor health issues. The Star-Tribune opens its story by talking about a woman, suffering from seasonal allergies, who “simply charged $25 to her credit card and spent a few minutes answering an online survey at Zipnosis.com. Hours later, she received a diagnosis electronically and picked up antibiotics at her pharmacy, without ever talking to the clinician in person or on the phone.” While the company operates only in Minnesota, it hopes to expand to 15 states next year.

Who is most likely to benefit from such a service? “One of the company’s target groups is young adults ages 18 to 35, who often are not insured, don’t get sick often and are looking for ways to save money.”

Sounds great if you’ve got a known health condition and need a new prescription. But I wonder how long it will take for the regulatory state to strike down this modest advancement in consumer freedom? For in this same story, I read this: “But there are skeptics. Some local doctors say they wouldn’t recommend Zipnosis to their patients for fear of misdiagnosis.”

Some doctors will resent the fact that they may lose business for simple transactions, and government regulators are prone to, well, regulate.

Alternatives in Direct Payment: Hello Health

An article in The Weekly Standard on alternatives to insurance-driven medicine cites several companies, one of which is Hello Health, which has  physicians from California to New York and Florida, and Colorad, Kansas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and other states along the way.

Author Tony Mecia describes it as an example of a company that enables a “a ‘concierge’ or ’boutique’ practice” that “combine[s] the acceptance of traditional health insurance with an added fee, which doctors say relieves the pressure to move quickly from one patient to the next and allows them to focus on prevention, not just treatment.”

Hello Health helps patients find physicians and schedule office appointments as well as online consultations, and says that “in some cases it’ll cost you a little more than a traditional office visit co-pay.” Hello Health is a decentralized network, in that each doctor sets his or her own rates, though Hello offers centralized billing, through credit cards. It takes a cut of each physician’s payments.

Though you can use Hello Health if your insurance company lets you use out-of-network doctors, though it offers this warning: “please keep in mind that no insurance company pays for emails, IM and video visits.” That may be one reason why it works best if you have a high-deductible health plan.

For physicians, Hello Health offers technological and marketing support, start-up financing, and of course a way to make a living without having a paperwork-fueled, high-volume practice.

Interesting enough, Hello Health’s parent company is based in Canada. Maybe the experience with government care provided the principals with some insights that will help them adjust to the world of ObamaCare.

After ObamaCare Passes, Increased Use of Non-Insurance Alternatives Up

Will health care “reform” spark a change among Christians in their thinking on health insurance? The Miami Herald reports on a small but growing number of Christians who are ditching health insurance for participation in what it calls “faith-based health collectives.” It features a Florida man who, for about one-third of the cost of his former insurance, participates in participates Medi-Share. The most significant downside I see for participants: No tax deduction, as is the case with employment-based insurance.

For more on this topic, see the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries.