Healthcare Warnings Ahead

The upcoming changes in the country are causing tremendous confusion. It is obvious that many different agencies are looking to make headway’s and try to save money. Indeed, when financial situations and the financial markets show lower revenues, large companies are looking to save money. This is where insurance companies that are some of the largest investors in the world must find a way to keep their investments safe. In order to do, they have the option of increasing the fees to their constituents or decreasing their expenses. Obviously increasing their fees to the constituents is quite difficult and demands overcoming many regulations. Just as well it is understandable that a lot of people could only pay up to a certain amount before being too squeezed out financially and not being able to pay their fees. The secondary option is clearly to decrease their expenses. Just as much as most companies are only able to save a marginal amount by looking at their overall profit and loss report, the easiest way to save money is by paying out less to the doctors who are the providers of the services. Unfortunately, as it has been historically true that the first ones to get hit are typically the services the insurance companies believe are not as critical or as necessary. This of course includes Chiropractic Care. We’ve seen that Chiropractic care has taken a big dive in reimbursements and we find more and more insurance companies that allow less reimbursements. With lower reimbursements and the office expenses either being the same or higher than they have been (considering the minimum wage has increased steadily on a regular basis) what is a doctor to do?

Of course an alternative would be to either increase the number of new patients exponentially or increase the charges per patient for services rendered. Two options that are definitely viable although they do cost money. For option number one which is to increase the number of new patients, the option is to spend more money on marketing to attract a larger volume of patients, therefore being able to have many more services rendered. The second option is to increase the amount of money being billed for each patient for services rendered. One of the way that this has been done is to offer the patients services that were not available before such as we find in an integrated practice. It is well accepted fact that according to the latest Chiropractic polls published on a yearly basis by Chiropractic Economics is that Chiropractic practices make more money on a shorter period of time than nonintegrated practices. A medically integrated practice offers the opportunity, by the mere fact that there are multiple practitioners working together under one roof, to render greater services and therefore be able to collect more money. This is one of the best solutions that can be applied today in order to stay in practice.