Doctor Mike

And then why send that bill?

Why send the bill?

And then, you know why they're sending the bill, but on the off chance that someone's like, Oh, I owe money.

I'm going to send some cash.

Maybe not a hundred, but they start making some form of payments.

Whereas my biggest piece of advice for folks is always inquire, always argue, always ask.

Because when it comes to billing, even for me as an outpatient doctor, meaning that I don't take care of patients when they're admitted into the hospital, I take care of them outside in the clinic.

When they come in, sometimes I'll order tests and they won't be covered because the diagnosis code doesn't vibe with what the insurance company wants.

So all I have to do on my end is adjust the code.

Now that sounds easy, but when it's a patient from two months ago and I have to figure out what code is appropriate that could work, it becomes a disaster, especially once you're scaling that over hundreds of patients.

But it's doable.

And if you don't ask, you might be stuck paying a huge bill for absolutely no reason.

If you even know the inside baseball of it all, what happens is sometimes there's one price that they'll give to insurers because they know that insurers reflexively pay only 60% of whatever they bill.

So they'll raise up that number because they're like, we're only going to get 60%.

So let's make the price much higher.

And then when you come in to pay and you say, I only have cash, I don't have insurance, they still charge you that ridiculous rate that they only expect 60% of from the insurer, but they charge you the full 100%.

So it's a disaster on so many fronts.

I react to medical memes and TikToks.

I'm not the solution here.

Number one, transparency.