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Why is health insurance a broken system?! Insurance, like many things, started out with good intention. At the beginning healthcare costs were too expensive to incur for individuals, health insurance came off as an altruistic means of making healthcare affordable. Since then, times have definitely changed. It used to be a physician would see and evaluate their patient, and maybe perform a procedure to help them. The patient would then pay the doctor directly.

For example, let’s say you see the doctor, and then have a knee injection. The doctor must perform their examination, speak with you about treatment options, and then you elect to do a procedure within that appointment. For the services, the doctor believes that they should get $100 for evaluation, and $75 for the procedure. His costs include the supplies used for the procedure. So the total visit is $175. Once insurance got involved, the doctor would charge $175 to the insurance company, the insurance company would turn around and “negotiate“ the prices, and reimburse $80 for the visit and the procedure. The doctor would then tell the insurance company, “I need $175 so that I can pay for my supplies, pay for my facilities, pay my staff, and then hopefully make a profit so that I can pay off my ridiculously high student loans.” Insurance would come back and say, well if you want to get $175, then you need to charge $400 total for the evaluation and procedure. So then the doctor charges $400, insurance pays them $175, everything is peachy now, right?! But what about the extra $225? Well that is now the patient’s responsibility, they have to pay that amount, and they don’t pay it to the doctor, they are supposed to pay that to their insurance company. So now on top of their monthly insurance costs they have to pay for, they have to pay an additional $225 for this visit.

These days insurance has changed even more, rates are excessively high, there are programs that are cheaper, but they have extremely high deductible rates. Some people have to spend $5000, $10,000, even $20,000 until they meet their deductible! This is no longer health insurance, this is “disaster insurance“. Your routine health care is no longer “covered” by your insurance, not until you meet your deductible. This is what our health insurance system has become. It is no longer about health, it is about profits for insurance companies, profits for hospital hospitals and systems, profits for non-medical individuals who have nothing to do with your healthcare other than being a cog in the “system.” Insurance companies are not watching out for patients, they didn’t go to years of school like physicians did to learn to care for people, help them when they are at their lowest points of their lives; they went to business school, they learned how to make a profit, and how to take the biggest slice of the pie for themselves. Healthcare should not be the business of money, it should be the business of wellness!

So why do we even need insurance these days? Well, we still have potentially disastrous things that could occur to us. Maybe we are in a severe automobile accident, maybe we come down with a serious illness that requires extensive hospitalization, or cancer. We do need insurance for things like these, as the expenses that would be owed most people cannot afford.

This is similar to car insurance: if you get a flat tire, you will not use your car insurance, but you definitely know that you can’t drive around on a flat tire, as you know the damage it will do to your car. Very similar, if you injure your knee, you know you can’t get around on it well, and you can do more damage to your body by trying to walk and/or run around on it. You need to get it fixed, but do you need to use your health insurance?! The answer is no, you can cut the health insurance companies out of the process, you can cut the middlemen out.

An insurance-free, or better put, insurance-liberated practice, such as Motion is Medicine, is not about the business of medicine, it is about taking care of people. It is about the physician and the patient sitting across from them. Leave insurance for the more disastrous things that could occur to you, and seek out good quality care from a physician who truly cares about your wellness, your well-being, and finding a way for your body to become well again!