How To Find An Affordable Doctor In New York

By Author: Lifoot Care
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Finding affordable healthcare can be extremely difficult and time-consuming. Quite often, when a patient calls a doctor’s office looking for pricing, they aren’t able to give a straight answer as to the patient responsibility portion of the payment without further outreach to a patient’s insurance company. This is because patient payments vary based on if the member has hit their yearly deductible (the amount of money that the insured must pay before insurance pays a claim) and the member’s coinsurance, (the percentage of service costs a member must pay once their deductible is hit) which varies from patient to patient.

It is a little known secret that in the medical field, the prices a doctor charges for the same service can vary wildly for cash-paying patients. That being said, even if you have insurance, you can save a great deal of money by finding providers who don’t take your insurance by self-paying. In fact, the Wall Street Journal gave an example of a patient in San Francisco who paid $2,500 for an MRI using insurance, not knowing they could have gotten one for $725 if they skipped their insurance. ...
... That’s a savings of $1,775!

In the above example, the insurance company paid 50% of the service, but the amount insurance companies reimburse varies a great deal, as mentioned earlier. Quite often, a patient will think they know what something costs because the doctor calls the insurance company for a quote but when it comes down to it, the patient owes a lot more than they anticipated resulting in surprise bills. The dreaded, unexpected insurance bill, often resulting from insurance back-end errors or denials, is a fact of life for tens of millions of Americans. It is also responsible for causing many bankruptcies.

This state of affairs in the healthcare market is counter to the trend in shopping… The internet has made price discovery commonplace. We can instantly see what anything costs just by searching Google or Amazon and we are confident in the quality of these products due to other user reviews. Anything from consumer goods to real estate to flights have specialized sites where consumers can shop and repair.

The challenge with healthcare is the market is quite opaque. Not only do many patients not know what a medical procedure costs in advance, the doctor too gets paid a different amount by different insurance companies for the same procedure. The many moving parts that make up the patient portion of health insurance also add a complicating layer to price transparency.

In order to reduce your costs, it is primarily most important to understand your health insurance plan and to call your insurance company to ensure a procedure is covered, should you need medical care. The next step is to find a quality physician at a fair price, and that’s where we come in.

How to Find a Cheap Doctor in New York

When searching for a doctor, you should call various offices and ask them what the price will be for the service .

All things being equal, you might choose the doctor with the cheapest price, but your time is an opportunity cost, meaning you must factor in distance. If you save $200 on an appointment but you need to hop on an Amtrak and then an Uber or perhaps rent a car, is the cost worth it?

Another thing to consider is, do you really want the cheapest doctor? Most people want an inexpensive service as long as the quality is good. In other words we need to factor in ratings. Perhaps we want a doctor with either three, four or five stars.

Now that we have our quality doctor at a price we can afford and they are located close enough to us that we don’t need a few days off from work to get there and back, we need to factor in availability. In other words, if we can’t see the doctor we want, when we want, then the entire exercise is for naught.

We can organize our research as follows… On the X axis we want to label, cost, distance, price and availability. On the Y axis let’s list the doctors.

Now, we are armed with the information we need to make an informed decision on how to save money on our healthcare.

In terms of the amount of time you’ll need, it will take perhaps 20 minutes or so per doctor to get the information but you’ll want to make an appointment when you call to ensure that the time slot stays open for you. Once you select your doctor, be sure to call all the other doctors and cancel your visit. This should take perhaps another five minutes per doctor.

The last step needed to find a cheap doctor, and perhaps the most important, is to make sure that you’re really saving money by going through insurance. Many NYC doctors take self-pay patients, and by using a technology similar to a hotel shopping engine such as TripAdvisor, you might be able to find a lower cost of care.

UMA Health connects cash-paying patients to doctors based on cost, distance, ratings and availability. You enter the type of doctor and location and find the prices for doctors, as well as reviews and their accreditation and education.

The average New Yorker pays $5,000 or more for health insurance in the Manhattan area and the five boroughs. On top of just this monthly cost, many also have copays for each visit and a deductible they need to reach before insurance even kicks in. In short, if you were to pay cash via UMA to doctors and skip insurance all together, you could save $5,000 or more on non-hospital based care. Another perk of booking through UMA is that you get 5% back on every service you book to spend on other healthcare services down the road.

Technology has made price transparency available to just about every industry and with the advent of UMA Health, patients can now shop healthcare services like all the other products and services they buy. Shop around, self-pay and save.