Change The Way You Healthcare

Let me know if this scenario sounds familiar to you: you’ve been experiencing some back pain for a couple of years now, you have an active lifestyle, you are constantly moving at work and you were very fit when you were young but find it hard to exercise because you’re too busy. Your back pain is never so bad that you thought it merited a trip to your family doctor but then last week your son or daughter asked you to help them move. You agree to help because you’re a great guy/gal and you try to lift something that’s just a little bit too big or awkward and you immediately have a sharp pain in your back with zinging going down one leg. You can’t move for the rest of the day, you call your family physician and get an appointment for the next week. You sit in the waiting room for about 30-40 minutes before being taken back by an assistant to take some information and ask some questions. You then wait for another 30-40 minutes in the exam room and your physician shows up, asks some questions, gives you a prescription for a pain medication and almost exactly 7 minutes after your physician walks in that exam room they are walking back out again. If your physician is younger they might have also given you a referral to a physical therapist.

The therapist’s office calls you almost immediately, maybe before you even get home from the doctor’s office and schedule an evaluation with a physical therapist in the next 1-3 days. You show up to your therapy appointment, the pain medication is helping a little but not taking away the burning down your leg. The therapist brings you back, chats for about 5 minutes, they may or may not test some movements and muscle strength/flexibility and another 5 minutes you’re out in the gym on a treatment table getting heat and electric stimulation. You are at therapy for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, you see your therapist for about 15 minutes in total and you maybe feel a little bit better. Maybe laying on the traction table felt nice. You go to therapy for about 2-3 months and you do feel better by the end but you wonder was it in the therapy or was it just the amount of time that had passed since your injury?

If this scenario sounds familiar to you you’re not alone. Unfortunately this happens way too often, the physicians and therapists are so busy trying to see as many patients as they can to keep their profit margins in the green that you end up getting put through the American healthcare system.

As physical therapists our main shtick for why insurance should pay for our services was because ultimately we would save them money. Instead of sending a client straight to a surgeon where the expected bill could be anywhere from $36,000 to $190,000, why not send them to a therapist first who can get them back to what they love for an average of $2,000. For the past 8 years however, therapists have been experiencing cuts to insurance reimbursements which causes them to have to see more patients in order to make a profit. So when a therapist might have been able to see a patient every hour, and work with them for a full hour, now they are seeing a patient every 8 minutes. I lived through this and let me tell you my patient’s outcomes kept getting worse and worse. I came to the conclusion that a therapist's best tool in improving patient outcomes was time spent with the patient. Not how many cool gadgets they had or certifications after their name.

Something needed to change, patient outcomes were getting worse, reimbursement was going down, once important values were slowly getting crushed under company pressures to maintain profit margins. The answer to me was pretty clear, the healthcare model needs to change.

Why do I refuse to work with insurance? There are a few reasons why I refuse to work with insurance companies. I refuse to be told who or how to treat, I refuse to be paid less and less for services I know change lives, I refuse to contribute to the decline of American healthcare.

There are so many benefits to working as a cash-based practice. The first and foremost is better patient outcomes. Getting to work one-on-one with a client for an hour is so powerful, I get to observe how every exercise is performed, make corrections, check for the response to the treatment, and modify the plan of care in real-time. I believe in what therapists can do, I’ve saved patients from painful surgeries, expensive medications and even prevented suicide in one chronic pain patient. Therapy works and it gets the best results when you work one-on-one with a therapist which is getting harder and harder to do thanks to insurance reimbursement policies.

Another benefit to working a cash-based practice is total price transparency. It was so frustrating to me to see a client who was paying $1200 a month in premiums, had a $120 copay and after 5-6 months receive a bill from their insurance for another $5,000-$6,000 for services that their policy didn’t cover. In working cash-based you know exactly how much each treatment will cost and can plan accordingly. For now we charge $220 a visit and offer heavily discounted 6 and 10 visit packages to allow you to fully commit to us and we can fully commit to you.

I can also treat you for everything under my scope of practice. A therapist’s scope of practice and what an insurance company will cover are not the same unfortunately. One example is I offer effective treatments for TMD (jaw pain) which is covered under the Utah therapist scope of practice but only a handful of insurance providers will cover those services. By being cash-based I can treat the entire musculoskeletal system and not just what insurance will reimburse me for, which is a great benefit to you!

I believe that therapy can change your life, I’ve already seen it change hundreds of people’s lives in the time I’ve been practicing. By changing the way you healthcare I know this service can change your life as well. If you’re not sure your problem is something physical therapy can help with you can always schedule a free phone call consultation and we can talk it through together, even if I can’t help you, I’ll get you pointed in the right direction.

Wishing you well until next time!

A Video about how messed up healthcare is:

https://youtube.com/shorts/slAGP37Olks?si=c9kyRYXBfrgvJ3D-