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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Insurance Won’t Pay? Doctors May Have a Way

People whose health insurance does not cover certain medical procedures may have another option for funding. Increasingly, doctors are offering patients zero-interest loans to pay for expensive procedures. The trend might change the practice of medicine, said Dr. David H. Aizuss of Ophthalmology Associates of the Valley in Encino. “If you want to look at the whole big picture, the goal for many of us in medicine is to make cost transparent to the patient so that the patient has a much greater role in determining utilization of medical services,” said Aizuss, who is also president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association. “In our present system, patients are not aware of the cost for care they obtain. They go to the doctor. The insurance company pays the bill. The patient may get a bill for co-pay or their percentage of what they’re responsible for, but they don’t know how much it’s costing them.” With medical financing, however, it’s possible for patients to know exactly the cost of a procedure. “We’re seeing the cost of care skyrocketing,” Aizuss said. “If every physician has the prices of every procedure, the patient can decide, ‘I don’t want to do this, but I want to do that.’ If a patient knew getting an MRI cost $1,200 vs. $2,400 that may impact their decision process.” At his practice, zero-interest financing through Capital One Healthcare has been offered to patients interested in laser vision correction or refractive lens exchange, Aizuss said. “It’s much more attractive for a patient,” he said. But the doctor admitted that the overwhelming majority of his clients don’t finance because the longest period to finance is 18 months. Still, Aizuss insists, the advantage of the program is that it captures a pool of patients who might otherwise elect not to get a procedure. Pediatric dentist Dr. Joseph Sciarra, who practices in Woodland Hills, said his patients usually opt for financing when they don’t have insurance, their coverage is poor or they haven’t budgeted for the amount of work needed. Financing is also suitable for patients electing to have, as Sciarra put it, “unnecessary elective procedures,” such as cosmetic dentistry. “Newer technologies implants and those kinds of things are very expensive. Insurance is paying very little for it, and people are looking for an alternative means to pay for it,” he said. “We do teeth whitening for teenagers and some orthodontics and that’s automatically a payment plan. On occasion, on older teenagers, we’re doing some porcelain veneers. So far, those families have been taking advantage of payment plans.” Without a doubt, no-interest financing has made cosmetic procedures more popular, Sciarra believes. Woodland Hills chiropractor Dr. Joseph Nguyen is considering incorporating zero-interest financing into his practice. He’s heard colleagues talk about setting up Pay Pal accounts and lines of credit for customers. “With the way the healthcare industry is going, especially in my profession as a chiropractor, I think it’s a great trend,” he said. That’s because providers are increasingly refusing to cover common chiropractic procedures. “What it comes down to is that the non-surgical type of therapy becomes obsolete,” he said. “They’re making it hard for doctors out of network to get any kind of reimbursements.” While financing may offer benefits to both patients and doctors, mixing medicine with business can be tricky if patients feel they are being coerced into having high-priced procedures performed. Aizuss, for one, doesn’t feel that offering patients financing for medical work presents any dilemmas at his practice. “Medicine is a business, so I would consider it as an opportunity to allow access to a procedure. It’s just one more way of enabling the vast majority of patients,” he said. At Ophthalmology Associates, patients who opt for such financing deal directly with the finance company, according to Aizuss. Representatives in his office “are not selling them on interest-free,” he stressed. “We do not like to sell patients. We offer the patients options, and it’s the patients’ choice. In our office, we do not view financing as an inducement to undergo a procedure.”

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