I love calling a provider before medical services are rendered to settle on financial terms, and I love it when they have a reasonable cash price ready for me – but it’s all too rare to get a reasonable price easily.  Usually, I need to wade through concepts and terminology like “regular rates,” “commercial contracts,” and “networks,” and excuses like “I’ll see what I can do,” “our clients don’t process claims that way,” and plenty more. It never ends.

I want to pay a cash lump-sum for a service you’ve provided hundreds (or thousands) of times, and you really can’t tell me the price?

However, with the steady emergence of more consumers being responsible for paying for their medical care (in the form of higher OOP) and perhaps continued provider frustration, more providers are now offering cash discounts (thanks to transparency pioneers like Surgery Center of Oklahoma). Consider these other examples:

[This clinic] does not accept any third-party payment and makes no apologies for this. In order to keep costs down for the uninsured and the increasing number of patients who have high copays and deductibles, we choose to not assume the massive overhead involved in billing third-party payers. This has the added benefit of eliminating bureaucratic hassles and intrusions into the doctor-patient relationship, ensuring confidentiality of patient information and keeping our typical charges usually between the costs of an oil change and a brake job.¹

* * *    

[This health system] offers cash pricing for selected services. Cash-pricing packages must be paid in advance of receiving services. Insurance will not be billed and claim forms will not be provided. If you would like information on cash packages, please call …²  

* * *

Does [this hospital] offer a discount if I self-pay for services? [This hospital] offers a 75 percent discount on eligible services to patients who pay out of pocket for medical services — whether it’s because you don’t have insurance, your insurance doesn’t cover the services, or you’d prefer not to bill through your insurance provider.³

Swedish Health Services may have seen the writing on the wall when they decided to lower their charges for certain outpatient services (bear in mind these are ordinary charges, not cash rates). On their old billing platform, an MRI of the brain was billed at $6,143; the new billing is $1,810 (70% less).

In many ways, cash rates are a type of network unto themselves. Providers are basically saying, “If you can pay cash at the time of service, these are the rates, and they are good. If you want us to bill an insurer, have the claim repriced, pended, denied, re-coded, covered, denied, covered, we will bill you our much maligned chargemaster rates, and the claim will be paid with our equally maligned network rates.”   

We are truly only at the beginning of this trend, and it is difficult to assess how many providers are now offering cash rates and how many are publicizing that fact; offering cash rates can be viewed as a form of direct-to-consumer contracting.

The American Academy of Private Physicians estimates there are about 6,000 physicians in the US who contract directly with their patients without an intermediary. That is roughly 1% of physicians, but this number has reportedly been growing at a rate of 25% per year for the last four years ⁴, and despite the fact that this is decimal dust compared to the market at large, the trend is likely to continue.

All things considered, we need more providers to step up and post their cash prices for consumers to consider.  The providers who pioneer in this area will be rewarded with business from a large market that is getting increasingly desperate for honesty and transparency.

¹ Sean Parnell, “The Self-Pay Patient”, January 2014, pg. 28
² https://www.uclahealth.org/pages/patients/patient-services/cash-pricing.aspx
³ https://www.elcaminohospital.org/patients-visitors-guide/billing/faq
⁴ Sara Rosenbaum, “Additional Requirement for Charitable Hospitals: Final Rules on Community Health Needs Assessments and Financial Assistance”, http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2015/01/23/additional-requirements-for-charitable-hospitals-final-rules-on-community-health-needs-assessments-and-financial-assistance/ (January 23, 2015)