holy christ, i'm in the wrong business
If you want to make money in the medical industry you need to work for an insurance company.
Doctors do bill high, and they get paid well, however in my practice an established MD with no claims against him will typically pay 40,000 a year in malpractice insurance... that's just insurance. Then, for each hospital he's staffed on he will pay between $250 - $1500 a year just to be on staff at the hospital, only before that he will need to pay a $500 application fee to get on staff at the hospital, and then another $500 fee on top of staff dues for re-credentialling every 2 years. Once he's on the hospital, he has to pay to belong to the hospital's IPA, Independant Practice Association, in order to get paid from insurance companies.
THEN he will have to negotiate with each insurance company in order to contract for services and become an accepted provider.
Once all this mess happens (and theres more I just didn't think of) then the insurance companies pay about 30% of what is actually billed, the rest is written off if the doctor has already collected whatever copay or co-insurance from the patient.
I was just looking over my 2006 figures this morning, and in 2006, our practice had 46% insurance write off.. which means that if we billed $120, we collect $20 from the patient and then collected $56 from the insurance company and then had to write off $46.
This sounds all good and fine until we do something like Botox injections where WE pay $485 a vile wholesale and only get reimbursed $500 from the insurance company.
Meanwhile, for our practice, an INDIVIDUAL policy runs over $700 a month... a family policy over $2,000.... so speaking from a medical practice standpoint, the insurance companies are taking EVERYONE's money
edit scratch that... we had a 46% COLLECTION rate, including copays and patient coinsurance.
