I pay cash at the doctor's office. I pay cash, because our insurance doesn't cover them--not that it would pay before the deductible anyway, but hey. I like them.
The billing specialist for the office was the one that dealt with me checking out and paying for services yesterday. She was really surprised that we continued to use their office, despite paying for it out of pocket, and asked if we had insurance. And then asked why we hadn't changed healthcare providers. I mentioned that we liked them, preferred to save them the trouble of billing an insurance that won't pay them, and that health care was a line item in the family budget.
She frowned--more confused and befuddled than anything else--and said, "Huh. Weird. I don't think I've ever even heard of that. In your budget? Wow."
And, as she'd rambling on in this vein, I'm thinking, "And that's why we got saddled with the 'Affordable' Care Act."
55 minutes ago
Exactly right!
ReplyDelete:-D
DeleteI have a doctor I self-pay at because she's out of network, but she's treated me for an issue for 20 years and I'm not gonna change now. The office workers there know me and know why I self-pay, so they aren't a pain about it.
ReplyDeleteI'd think the office worker would be HAPPY to learn someone liked the practice enough to pay out of pocket to go there!
It wasn't that she wasn't happy, more that she was shocked, and completely befuddled by something so far out of her experience (she's probably right around 25 or younger).
DeleteBudget??? What a novel concept... And my dentist stopped taking ANY insurance four years ago, and he dropped his prices by over 50%, and STILL makes a living.
ReplyDeleteMine gives a 30% discount to those who pay out of pocket.
DeleteAnd yes. We have a budget. A fairly tight budget, since there's tuition to be paid on two kids' schooling, and on Odysseus's accounting classes.
Yeah, sigh... Us little people have to budget, .gov? Not so much... sigh
DeleteI haven't seen too many in Odysseus's and my income bracket who have and live by a budget. Double sigh.
DeleteThat thing kind of befuddles me. I make good dough and *I* have a budget and keep to it. And if something big comes up I have to pay for, I recalibrate so I spend less in the coming months.
DeletePerhaps so many people have debt problems b/c no one taught them to budget? My parents taught me. I'm guessing the schools don't teach it, didn't teach it when I was in school.
Parents in a two-full time-income household are too busy (or too lazy, using "busy" as an excuse) to bother trying to teach their kids manners, much less anything else useful. I'm already working on it with my kids.
DeleteAnd no, budgeting isn't taught in schools unless the kid takes math for dummies--which I did, but had already learned how to budget from my mother.