00:00
Alright. Alright, you guys today, we are going to talk about why we don’t take insurance. This is Julie and Kara protocol sport systems. We get asked a ton about why we don’t take insurance.
Because people always want to use our insurance for therapy. There’s a really big reason why, first of all, in my opinion, the healthcare system is broken because it’s being handcuffed by the insurance companies.
Absolutely. For sure. Let’s do a breakdown of why we don’t take insurance.
Copays Are Expensive
00:38
I’ve worked on the other side of, with physical therapy and billing through insurance.
Typically, you’re going to come in, you’re going to pay a copay, which is anywhere between 40 to $60 on average, sometimes more, maybe a little less, if you’re lucky, and then you’re going to be with a physical therapist, we are stuck with only treating the one body part that your doctor refers you for.
If you have shoulder pain, that’s where we get to live. We don’t get to look up at your neck, down your back and actually figure out if it’s not coming from your shoulder where the real problem lies. So that’s one issue. Another issue is going to be, we’re stuck with a time code. I can only work with you for 8 to 23 minutes,
01:27
You guys. Not only do you have to have a prescription from your doctor that only allows us to work with what you have going on.
You think you’re $25 or 50 or $70 copay or whatever. It’s cheaper. That way. It doesn’t, it really limits you get eight to 23 minutes, that’s it with a physical therapist.
01:51
Not much time for us to get our hands on you and do something with you and figure out how you’ve been since the previous treatment where we’re going to go next.
If something weird comes up, we can’t really address it because we don’t have the time to.
If it doesn’t fall within the one body part we’re working on, we can’t really address it legally.
After you’re with us for eight to 23 minutes, then we hand you off to likely a non-licensed college age kid.
Who’s going to take you through all the exercises and hope they don’t hurt you doing it because they really don’t know the difference.
They’re not allowed to touch you or shift you and make sure you’re actually activating the right muscles. Once you go through your exercises, you get thrown back on ice and whatever.
They can bill you because the reimbursement rates are so minimal that they have to add on all these extra things to even get it worth the time to have you actually see the physical therapist for the eight to 23 minutes.
02:50
It’s really a poor system, but what we do here, I’ll let you go.
Insurance Takes The Humanity Out Of It
02:57
This is one of the reasons why I started this company is because I didn’t understand. I get the other side of things like in order to make any money, the medical institution has to double and triple book.
You are laid on top of one another. If you ever wonder why there’s so many patients sitting in the office, it is because they all have the same appointment time as you do. In order to get the reimbursement, there’s got to be a flow of, come back, come back.
If you’re thinking from the patient or the client standpoint, it takes me an hour over there out of my day to get there. I gotta make an appointment to be there for an hour.
I only get to see a therapist for 20, 30 minutes max, and then I’m getting put into exercises and then I have to pay for parking and then find my way back.
03:49
I have to come for a minimum of six to 12 visits, like it’s over and over again. It’s this crazy cycle.
This is one of the reasons why I decided to start this place, because I feel like there’s a huge lack of being able to actually talk to the client and find out what’s going on. Find out where their history lies, find out really what the depth of their injury comes from.
Because a lot of times it doesn’t come from where they’re hurting. It’s coming from a whole different area like Kara said.
What we do is we spend an hour with you.
04:28
Really get to the depths of what’s going on. Not only that, but we get to touch you the first time we really get to put our hands on you and find out what it is based on.
What you’re telling us is does that really actually correlate with whatever is in what your body is telling us because your body tells a whole different story.
04:47
And that’s a good point. Like when you go to the physical therapy clinic for the first time, you have to fill out all the insurance forms, the myself as the clinician will have to sit through and take all your range of motion measurements, do all your strength testing.
I really don’t get the opportunity to get down to the treatment portion, right? Especially if there’s a lot going on, because we’re looking at, your gait, your posture, this and that, while you’re here, we can do a very quick assessment and kind of get down to the nitty gritty because we don’t have to document all of these things and we can actually get to the treatment and we have the hour to do it.
In the insurance world, they’re so backlogged with all the paperwork that they really don’t get the opportunity to treat you the way you should be treated and fix it the way it should be fixed.
05:35
So that’s a big thing.
05:37
Yeah. Not only that, but because we spend an hour with you, a lot of times we can get a lot more accomplished within that first hour, then the two 12 visits. A lot of times we’re here in like three.
05:50
Yeah. That’s what we’ve been finding is, so what you would have typically gotten taken care of in six sessions with a traditional physical therapy clinic, we can actually get there almost always in three sessions.
You’re getting more time with us, which makes sense. We get twice the amount of time with you and we get to treat you up and down the body. Versus in the physical therapy clinic, you’re only addressing the one area part and you’re getting half the amount of time.
It takes twice as long, which means twice as many copays versus with us. If your copay is 40 to $60, you’re going for six sessions, that’s $240 to $360 for those six sessions. That’s a lot of money versus with us, three sessions is only $375. So there you go. Huge difference with that. You’re getting twice the amount of time.
06:43
That when people ask us why we don’t take insurance and they always want to know if we do take insurance, this is why we want to provide you with the best care possible.
It’s Easier To Go Without Insurance
What we’ve found is that it’s easier for us to go without insurance, because then we know that we can give you the time that your worth, because you guys are very important to us and your time is valuable. I know our time is valuable. I know your time has to be valuable.
We value that time that you have taking out of your day to get better. We want you to get better as fast as possible. That is our goal. The other thing why we’ll say that we do really quickly is we work double and triple people.
We don’t have two or three of us one client almost all the time. You’re going to see the majority of us because we are able to be a comprehensive integrative and collaborative.
07:37
We collaborate on almost everybody that comes in here. You’ll see two and three people co-treating to make sure that we can give you what you need. Yeah.
The next time you think about the insurance company and how your copay works, that’s really the inside scoop on why we don’t take insurance and what what’s going on with insurance. So,
07:59
Why it benefits you to not go through insurance when you see us, because if you do, then we get handcuffed and you’re not really getting treated the way you should.
08:08
That’s true. So I hope that clears things up. Ask yourself before you leave, how do you value your time? Like if you’re currently injured, what, where’s the value in that?
Like how much is it worth you to, for you to like, I don’t take a few minutes out of your day and come and see us. We offer a 15 minute quick fix or quick fix. We offer a 50 minute injury assessment.
15 minute free injury assessment
I wish we were that good and quick to get you a few minutes. Sometimes we are, but we offer a 15 minute free injury assessment. If you have any questions come on in, we would love to be able to see what’s going on, touch your body and see what we can do to help you.
I hope you have a great day and we will talk to you again real soon.