My Patients Will Never Go for It
By William D. Esteb
After hearing a couple of prospective new patients bail on the telephone because you weren’t on their list of preferred providers, it’s tempting to believe that your patients would never embrace a non-assignment-accepting cash practice.
And you’d be right.
Many patients show up as damaged goods. Besides pharmaceutical brainwashing every night on television, many patients cling to the belief that their policy will cover all the care they’ll need. They come in waving their membership card as if it had value. This puts you in the unenviable position of being the bearer of bad news. Welcome to the new realm of patient financial education. Along with the burden of explaining chiropractic, you now have the added responsibility of explaining the business of health care. In other words, their carrier doesn’t care, it’s a business not a public utility and if they embrace the profit motives of their carrier, they’ll become a statistic, caught in the middle.
True, there are people who care more about someone else paying than for the care! Maybe you’ve attracted these types of people with your most insurance accepted yellow page ad. After running with the wrong crowd it’s tempting to think that all patients are irresponsible and uninterested in true health. This, at a time when organic food sales are skyrocketing enough to interest Wal-Mart, bottled water sales continue to soar, weight management firms explode, being a personal trainer has become a career path, Bowflex is a household name and supplement companies like the Vitamin Cottage are no longer cottage industries.
All paid with cash. Not covered by third parties.
So you’re right. If you’ve been dutifully filing insurance claims and cozying up to as many managed care plans as possible, you may very well have surrounded yourself with people who would never pay you cash, file the claims with their carrier and wait to get reimbursed.
But there’s a more serious problem. Many chiropractors believe that they offer a service that just isn’t worth paying cash for! They believe that chiropractic is such a marginal discipline that if a third party didn’t foot the bill, no one would show up. Believe this, and your practice will die the slow, painful death of asphyxiation.
So, you may be facing one or two very serious problems: a lack of access to those who value their health and pay cash to advance it, plus, the corrosive belief that as a chiropractor you’re an inferior species: an over-educated and expensive physical therapist. No wonder you don’t believe the seminar rah-rah that in all of history this is the best time to be a chiropractor.
One of these beliefs (yours) can be changed. More about that in a minute. Getting your current crop of patients to more highly value their health is unlikely. Remember, these are patients up to their eyeballs in debt, having refinanced their home, paid off their credit cards and then went on a spending spree. When you’re a bad transmission away from bankruptcy, showing up in your office for nonsymptomatic wellness care once or twice a month is a pipe dream.
You’ve got to find people who value their health. Which means telling the chiropractic story to as many strangers as possible. It means seeing new patients as something that can be farmed rather than mined. It means getting out of your office and telling people the truth about their body’s amazing capacity to heal.
I know. After all these years in practice you think you shouldn’t have to do lectures, screenings, community outreach events or speak at career day events at the local high school. But how else do you think your community is going to find out about the incredible thing you do?
You must take a stand. You must plant your flag. You must offer hope and direction for a growing number of people who prefer to shun the latest drug concocted by the medical-industrial complex but don’t know about you. You must use the shield of faith and the sword of truth.
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William Esteb is creative director of Patient Media, Inc., a patient communication resource company for chiropractors. Review his materials and request a free 64-page New Patient catalog by visiting or calling (800) 486-2337.