Why Pay Cash?
You and I are a team, with your goals and values as top priority.
Attached is an extensive narrative on a clinics choice to be “cash-based”. Please read through if your interested in learning more about how being seen by a “cash-based” clinician, such as myself, allows us to work as a team towards your goals for rehab and beyond.
Here are the hot talking points worth pulling out:
Insurance companies dictate how much clinics get paid and if it isn’t enough to make the clinic happy then the clinic has to get creative and often times that comes at the expense of the patient’s quality of treatment and time spent with the therapist… what can this look like?
More passive modalities (ultrasound, electrical stimulation, hot packs, ice)
The staff therapists get burnt out with productivity requirements or they get incentives to discharge you “early”
An aide is doing your exercise treatments
Insurance companies require third-party medical necessity reviews for therapy, thereby limiting even further who you can see, when you can see them, and how often. While the insurance companies will argue that they are doing this to promote evidence-based medicine (i.e. efficacious treatment) the fact of the matter is they are trying to find ways to protect profits by refusing to cover physical therapy that goes beyond “basic activities of daily living”. In other words, they won’t cover you if you can’t play basketball without pain, run without pain, or do anything else that you value.
Evidence-based medicine? Don’t worry, I have a specialization in treating athletes, awarded to me by my accrediting body the APTA, don’t let insurance companies tell you who you should see, you should want to see the best and to be frank, the insurance companies don’t know what that is, because only YOU and I (the specialist) know that.
When you see a “cash-based” physical therapist you are taking the power of authority back into your own hands and out of the hands of the insurance companies. Do you value playing basketball on the weekends? Let’s work on that. Do you value being able to run that marathon well rather than just sort of ok? We can work on that too. You set your goals and no one can tell you how much they are worth.
This story is COMMON these days as clients begin to see that insurance companies don’t have their long term mobility goals and values in mind … there is no need for me to reinvent the narrative, feel free to read the entire post from this Oregon clinic “Headquarters Physical Therapy” LINK