Medical Providers Cut Back On Collection With Credit Cards

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

Touting that it is fact that it is a way of making sure medical providers collect their pay while keeping administrative costs down, the business has been around since 2008. It works like this: upon arriving at their doctors office, patients are informed by their medical care provider what the maximum amount a particular procedure will most likely cost. The patient slides their credit card, gets the procedure done, and gets sent out of the office with a receipt and a detailed slip of services that were provided.

After that has happened the doctor will bill the patient’s insurance company. It will tell the doctor 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 whole price of the procedure is charged.

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

Patient’s health care payments are now over three hundred billion dollars a year, and that number is supposed 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 been shown to reduce delinquent accounts by up to eighty percent.

However some researchers are skeptical. The problem of patients who do not pay off their balance each month has not been resolved yet, much less the issue of a patient not having a credit card.

Mallory Megan works for a debt collection agency. She also writes articles on business and finance, consumer spending and collection agencies.