Insurance Billing Versus Self Pay for Your Private Practice?
You started your private practice thinking you would accept insurance billing and it was going to be great. Now some time has passed and you feel weathered with scars from the constant shifting world of fighting with insurance billing.
The insurance companies seem to keep changing the rules and it feels like someone is pulling the rug out from under you.
You have thought about looking into self pay for your private practice, but that feels like such a gamble.
Here is the deal, continuing to stay on the insurance panels will continue to produce the same results. They will never stop low balling your reimbursement. They will never stop playing the role of rejector of services. They will never stop the threat of clawbacks. They are in business to make money, and they do that by paying out as little as they can. They will always hold all the cards and they will always control your business as long as you continue to be on their panels. If you are good with that and don’t care, you can stop reading here and go back to that same cycle of complaining about insurance billing in all the private practice Facebook groups.
If on the other hand, you want to know that there is a feasible path to migrate your private practice from insurance billing to self pay, by all means, read on…
When we moved our private practice from insurance billing to private pay several years ago I was not convinced it was possible. My wife on the other hand was certain it was what we had to do in order to save our private practice.
It came on the heals of getting a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield that in the coming months our reimbursement for insurance billing was going to be reduced by thirty percent. Our private practice focuses on trauma work and asking people to see thirty percent more clients to make up for the shortfall was not an option.
We really started to look at what our options were, and eventually we figured that we needed to give self pay for our private practice a chance.
We put into place a plan to move from insurance billing to self pay in our private practice. It was scary as hell, but it worked!
What does this really look like? Well, it starts with understanding what you really need to run your business. We got really clear about our numbers. We knew exactly how many clients and session we needed each month to stay in business.
Then, we shifted all the time, energy, and money that we used in getting paid by insurance companies to creating a marketing strategy.
That is really the big difference.You change your business from insurance billing and stop giving up control of your business to bean counters and statisticians to taking control of your business and having a real path forward. This also comes with incredible freedom for you and your business.
When you move from insurance billing to self pay in your private practice you take back control of your business. It is really that simple.
In the end, we decided to trust ourselves and take control of our future rather than hope we didn't miss box 14 a this month on our insurance reimbursement forms resulting in insurance reimbursement rejection. I am pretty sure box 14 a was not even on the form that month and they just added it to piss me off.
We educated ourselves on marketing and niching so we could speak to the needs of the community we wanted to work with.
With a strong marketing strategy our clients have tended to be highly motivated and are really bought into the work that we do with them. They get results because they are investing in themselves.
Schedule a consult today to move your private practice from insurance billing to self pay.