“Medical practice that rely to heavily on insurance based payments will at some point find themselves underwater.”
It seems paradoxical, but is in may ways true: Practices that don’t take medical insurance are more stable than those that do.
The main worry that many docs have, when choosing to jettison their health insurances that they accept is that they won’t have enough patients. Without enough patients, they will have to shut down.
So they chose the seemingly stable path of going in network with insurance carriers, such that they have a flow of patients.
However, the stability is false. Maybe in the past it was a stable way to go, but not anymore. When you contract with health insurance companies, you can no longer control how much you get paid, and you can no longer control your overhead.
Insurance based practices necessitate high volume which means a lot of staff, office space, office furniture, benefits etc. Over time this goes up.
No direct control over your costs and how much you can charge is a recipe for insolvency.
Contrast that with insurance free practices where you can control everything. While your volume will be lower, so will your overhead. You can end up with just as much profit working significantly less, because less is going out the door.
Medical practice that rely to heavily on insurance based payments will at some point find themselves underwater (as overhead goes up and reimbursements go down). In come the sharks of private equity and hospital conglomerates.
The true way to autonomy and paradoxical stability is to leave health insurance behind.
