FWIW I would have refused. For the office an appointment unused is no revenue.
I would definitely also let the referring doctor know how awful the experience was and advise them to find someone else to refer to.
Yes. Make sure PCP knows.
I would never have paid that. Even if I was toting my leg in box.
There are always other places. Maybe the drive is longer. Or the place is not your favorite.
If your doc and others keep getting complaints they’ll quit using them to refer patients to.
Also the insurer, along with the specific reason for walking out. In case they try to charge for a “missed” appointment (which would almost certainly not be covered).
Ahem: “Ain’t Nobody Here But WE Chickens.”
snerk
My dentist is now requiring that the patient allow the front desk to run some kind of card-- Care Credit, credit, debit, HSA, Medicaid, anything that will work for the copay-- ahead of time. They don’t put a charge on it, they just make sure they can.
What they told me is that too many people were handing over cards that were expired, maxxed out, or just not working for some reason, forcing the office to set up a payment plan, even though it’s not their policy to do so-- and then half the patients don’t make their payments. They sue if it’s a high enough balance.
To be fair, the dentist does what she can for people-- she gets the maximum payment she can get from people’s insurance, she has joined networks when patients’ insurance has changed, putting her out of their network, and she usually has some kind of charity exchange going on every month. Donating a pair of shoes, old prescription eyeglasses, or hearing aids, can get you $10 credit, up to $40, IIRC, or volunteering for the community kitchen (free meals) can get you credit too. She’ll have something different every month, and she has some flyers in the bathroom (for privacy, I guess) you can take for places in town that might help pay for necessary dental work.
She’s young enough, she probably still has student loans.
I mean, she should get paid.
As a Nova Scotian (well now 10 years in Ontario) I’ve never heard of such wait times (you can check out the provincial estimates online). Six months sounds excessive just to see a specialist, not to say “common”.
I looked up getting a Breast Biopsy and the site reported the longest wait time in Amherst (34 days for the 50th percentile, 59 days for the 90th). Which seems long but within expected length.
ETA: Also, while I demand improvements I will NEVER give up our single payer healthcare service for a private American style one.
There was a point a few years ago where I just started skipping items on forms that I didn’t feel like filling out. I realized that if they were casually pushing forms in front of me, not caring if they’d already collected the info, they probably weren’t actually reading the forms either.
Lo and behold, I skip my SSN, I put “Mickey Mouse” as next of kin, I put my grandmother’s phone number as the insurance contact number, and nobody’s ever said a single fucking word about it. They don’t use it, they don’t care, it’s just about one office drone generating work for other office drones.
I’d still like to know why a physician needs your social security number. Unless they’re providing you some sort of rebate or income in any way, why do they need it?
Note that I’m in Canada, where our government takes great pains to explain that Social Insurance Numbers (“SINs,” basically, the same thing), are never to be shared with anybody except those who provide you with income. Employers, sure; banks yes (you earn interest on your accounts), investments through investment companies, stockbrokers, if it provides you with income, then you provide your SIN. If it doesn’t, you never do.
But not for a doctor’s appointment. Why is your SSN needed to see a doctor?
I believe it’s useful to them for debt collection, in case insurance doesn’t pay or whatever.
Which makes it all the more silly for a cash-up-front practice to ask for it. They have no need for it. Most likely they just downloaded the form off Bob’s Online Warehouse of Stupid Medical Forms without vetting it at all.
Your typical US doctor’s office has less administrative sophistication than sushi bar. I think doctors spend so much time in medical school learning medical stuff that they have no time left over to figure out how to run a business. I’ve heard financial advisors say that doctors are high earners but are notoriously bad with money.
The SSN is the de facto national ID number for Americans. And is totally embedded in the medical / insurance industry as the patient / policyholder ID number. It’s also the number used for all income tax reporting and paying purposes, so akin to your SIN in that usage.
It sure wasn’t ever intended as a national ID number. But a modern nation needs one and our 18th century politics prevents one from being invented. So commerce has led the way of subverting the intent of the SSN into being one.
Not sure what you’ve experienced in your life, but in my 30+ years of being on medical plans, my primary policyholder ID has always been something other than SSN.
They do insist on collecting your SSN, and it’s correlated to the policy, which I know due to countless occasions of losing my card and having to call customer support to confirm my policy number. But to my recollection SSN is rarely used as a primary account ID, because then it would be plastered all over every doc, and there is (or at least used to be) significant civil liability for leaking PII such as the SSN.
But yeah, it’s everywhere. Shouldn’t be, but it is.
I do know that they rely on SSN to ensure they can track down any patient who doesn’t pay their bills, which seems to be their highest priority these days. When I took my 8yo daughter to the hospital at 2am to get her appendix out a few years ago, waiting in the treatment room, the first cart we saw wasn’t an exam cart or triage cart, but the point-of-service payment cart. She’s sitting there moaning in pain and we’re no seeing a doctor, we’re seeing a payment administrator. It was really insulting.
I like to think I’m as cynical as the next guy, but: couldn’t it also be that, when someone is in front of you, and they’ve been there before, you go to pull up their file in the computer and maybe two people in your system have (a) the same name and date of birth, but have (b) different SSNs? Or maybe someone comes in who now has a different name and address than they did on their last visit — but they still have the same SSN, so you can easily locate their file?
That’s why they use it for debt collection. When you turn someone over to debt collectors, their policyholder ID is of little use when differentiating people with the same name, because it doesn’t follow them outside of that business.
But as I mentioned in my post, most companies use some other ID number than SSN. They can use that to distinguish similarly named people. They also have your phone number and can use that as well. There’s seldom any real reason that they must use your SSN, other than it’s extremely convenient because it can be used to look up way more information than you consented to, without needing to ask you for additional PII.