Sean Parnell reached out to us recently, expressing support of our cash-for-service model of primary care. We’re glad he did. Turns out he runs a blog called The Self Pay Patient and it’s a helpful resource for “tens of millions of Americans who are either uninsured, have high-deductible health insurance, or just want to escape from bureaucratic medicine…”
His blog entries are the basis of a book he’s currently writing that will be “a ‘users guide’ to self-pay medicine, explaining in detail how to find doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and other providers of health care goods and services…”
He recently wrote about a patient who needed knee surgery and benefitted indirectly from cash-only medicine. The first hospital he visited wanted an out of pocket payment (he had a “good” insurance plan) that was MORE than the cost of the whole operation at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, a cash-only facility. In the end, the patient used price transparency to negotiate and save about $3,000 on his procedure.
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Once more we see the power of the market, and price transparency, in making healthcare more readily available. We believe it’s worth writing down — every direct primary care practice and every cash-only hospital that offers competitive, cost-saving procedures, treatments, prescriptions, etc. puts pressure on the insurance companies to treat clientele more fairly. Cheers to Mr. Parnell’s blog for keeping a record of these establishments and spreading awareness of their benefits.
