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 idea that it is a way of ensuring that 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 informed by their medical care provider what the maximum amount a particular procedure will be likely to 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.
Then, the provider will bill the insurance company of the patient. It will tell the provider how much of the work is covered; the balance left over is charged on the card. If a deductible hasn’t been met, then the entire price of the procedure is charged.
With the increase of health care costs, more pressure has been placed on patients to pay their bills in the form of co pays, out of pocket expenses, and higher deductibles. With this increasing stress, unpaid and delinquent bills have become big issues for medical providers.
Patient’s health care payments are currently over three hundred billion dollars a year, and that number is expected 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 proven to reduce delinquent accounts by up to eighty percent.
But some analysts remain skeptical. The issue of patients who don’t pay off their balance each month hasn’t yet been resolved, much less the issue of a patient not having a credit card.
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