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 CD&RP Better Health Through Better Medical Care |
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Castlerock Diagnostic & Research Physicians Payment Assistance CashCare For persons with an "unmanageable" health insurance situation CashCare is a healthcare payment option offering a discounted medical fee structure as incentive for paying in full for medical care on the day of service. The plan is devised for individuals or companies who do not have insurance; or individuals or companies who choose to have only catastrophic insurance coverage. Medicare age patients are not eligible for this plan as it is disallowed. CashCare offers another option to the present cumbersome, expensive, inefficient bureaucratic health insurance systems. Plans where 25 to 30% of premiums go to administrative overhead and plans where your access to medical services is restricted by administrators whose purpose is to improve bottom line profits for their stockholders. This should not be considered a blanket statement about all health insurance plans since there are many healthcare companies that are trying to improve the present inefficient system. It should also be noted that Blue Cross/Blue Shield is a non profit company and does not adhere to a bottom line mentality. How does this allow us to offer you lower fees? The reasons are multiple. We don’t have to file insurance forms. We don’t have to deal with the insurance company when they deny your claim for a myriad of reasons. We don’t have to deal with “slow pay” schemes typical of many insurance companies. We don’t have to pay a billing service or a collection agency to collect fees due. The system is devised to lower your out of pocket expenses and it does so in several ways. First, office overhead is decreased so we can provide your healthcare for lower fees. Second, you can purchase a less costly, higher deductible catastrophic health insurance plan. The money you save from the lower cost policy could be put into a Medical Savings Plan. In this type of plan money not spent one year can be carried over to future years. If you do not use the money for healthcare expenditures, it can eventually be withdrawn, for your own use, much like an IRA account. Additional healthcare cost savings will also accrue as the result of better medical care. Over your lifetime, better medical care equates to fewer future medical expenses which equates to overall lower health care costs. The four cornerstones of exemplary, superior medical care are prevention of future disease (this is the most important), early diagnosis of treatable disease, aggressive treatment of existing disease and the promotion of lifestyle changes that insure overall wellness. The first and last points are closely related since in many cases prevention of disease is directly related to the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. Often a healthy lifestyle can be achieved by simply following proper diet and exercise programs and avoiding all tobacco products. The CashCare Plan is an effort to put you as the patient and me as the doctor, back in control of your healthcare instead of an insurance company. It makes you more responsible for your own health and healthcare costs, and thereby is an incentive for you to obtain the proper medical care which includes disease prevention, and encourages the adoption of a healthy lifestyle. In addition to lower fees in our office, we have negotiated discounted cash fees on procedures not available at our office. These include, in part, colonoscopy and other gastrointestinal procedures, mammograms, bone density scans, CT and MRI scans. An added feature of the CashCare program is assistance in lowering your prescription drug costs. This is a multifaceted effort that is tailored to your own specific medication needs. It involves both optimizing your medication regimen as well as utilizing drugs that are not only cost effective but also of proven efficacy and safety. We will utilize all available pharmaceutical company discount plans and special offers. In some cases we may recommend that you purchase your medications through non-traditional channels. You also have the option, if you so desire, to participate in pharmaceutical research studies that are being done at our sister company Castlerock Clinical Research Consultants, L.L.C.. Presently we are doing studies involving hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and others. These studies involve both drugs that are approved and on the market, and promising new drugs under investigation. These research studies invariably offer free physical examinations and laboratory studies which translate into medical cost savings or you. |
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