Sure, but bear in mind that private insurance has the same issue.
A given doctor doesn’t accept any insurance plan… they accept SOME of them. And in this regard, they are the same as medicare.
Almost any physician will take ANY commercial insurance. The issue comes down to whether or not they are contracted and going to them will actually produce expenses you’re expecting, aka In-Network vs Out of Network. It would be pretty challenging to find a physician who will actually refuse a commercial plan out right. So no… not like Medicare and Medicaid.
Maybe I’m just confused about what it means, but every doctor I have encountered only accepts specific insurance plans.
Now, it may just be that they accept any insurance, but overbill them and you get caught on the hook for the costs above the insurance plan’s payment, as you say.
It’s not over-billing if they are not on contract with your insurance. It’s typically called balance billing (I’m not a biller so I might be using the term just perfectly, but I know I am describing the process properly) and it’s perfectly legal. If they are not on contract with your insurance company, they have not promised or committed to anything price wise. This does not mean they won’t take your insurance. It simply means they don’t have an agreement with your insurance. The point is… they’ll take pretty much any commercial insurance and bill you the difference if the insurance doesn’t pay enough.
For Medicare and Medicaid… they might not take you as a patient at all until they have room for someone with that kind of insurance. It’s a lot rarer to see someone closed to Medicare though.
edit: and of course all of this is assuming it’s a covered service
My (somewhat dated) anecdotal experience is aligned with Timex here – about ten or fifteen years back my company had a regional (i.e., not Kaiser or Blue Cross/Shield) insurance plan, and their network was painfully small. More to the point, there were a couple of times when I tried to go out-of-network for some specialty or test or something, and the doctor’s office just flat-out wouldn’t accept it. Explaining to them that you knew that they were out-of-network didn’t help, they just wouldn’t accept me as a patient.
My assumption was that they had such a terrible time trying to get payment from the insurer in the past that they didn’t want the headache.
In that case you should be able to go as a cash patient and use claim forms to get reimbursed by your insurance company. That seems pretty rare. I mean heck all the business offices I’ve worked with will even bill AFLAC, and that’s not even real insurance. They do it as a courtesy.
Brace for impact: CBO score incoming in 15 minutes.
Main worry I have: MacArthur amendment to the AHCA allows states to allow garbage insurance plans that don’t cover pre-existing conditions. That’s likely to raise the number of people covered in the CBO estimate, even if those covered will not have use-able coverage.
Expect to see the deficit go boom on this, though, and people covered by Medicaid to take a big drop.
There’s a chance they’ll have to vote for the thing again according to this article.
Does that still hold true?
Nope. They got it in under the wire.
CBO says 23 million more uninsured. Lower premiums, but for a lot less covered.
And a lot less coverage. One-sixth of the population with pre-existing conditions will either pay exorbitant premiums or not be covered at all.
And some people unlucky enough to be older will pay just a tad more:
Working as intended! HUZZAH!
It would have been more, except for all those who die for lack of coverage.
Seems like this might show up in campaign ads.
I heard that on the radio coming into work this morning. CBS radio I think. Apparently the bill has to save X amount of money or it doesn’t fit under the means it was used to change the current ACA.
This is the fun part:
[quote]
In addition, the agencies expect that some people would use the tax credits authorized by the act to purchase policies that would not cover major medical risks and that are not counted as insurance in this cost estimate.[/quote]
Awww yiss! Capitalism!
I can’t tell you how fucking filled with Juffo-Wup my fibers are at the fact that my access to non-ER medical care now depends on the three least evil Republican Senators.
The “cross fingers and hope you don’t die” school of medicine is even fucking better in 2017 than it was in 1017!
