Will That Be Plastic Or Plastic? Medical Patients Now Required To Use Credit Cards

In recent news it was revealed that in Michigan at some doctor’s offices, patients will need to present and utilize their credit cards before receiving medical care. A fairly new internet based medical payment program allows medical providers to secure a credit card before medical help is provided.

Touting the notion that it is a way of making sure medical providers get paid while keeping administrative costs down, the company has been around since 2008. It works like this: after arriving at their doctors office, patients are told by their medical care provider what the maximum amount that a particular procedure will probably cost. The patient slides their credit card, gets the procedure done, and strolls out of the office with a receipt and a detailed slip of services provided.

At this point the provider will bill the patient’s insurance company. It will tell the provider how much of the work is covered; the balance left over is charged on the card. If a deductible hasn’t been met, then the entire price of the procedure is charged.

More pressure has been placed on patients to pay their bills in the form of co pays, out of pocket expenses, and higher deductibles with the increase of health care costs. With this increasing stress, unpaid and delinquent bills have become big issues for medical providers.

Patient’s health care payments are currently over three hundred billion dollars a year, and that number is expected to balloon up to twice that number by 2015. From this number, fifty to sixty billion dollars of current health care debts go unpaid. The program has proven to reduce delinquent accounts by up to eighty percent.

Yet some experts remain skeptical. The huge issue of patients who do not pay their credit card balance every month has not yet been resolved, much less the issue of a patient not having a credit card.

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