Direct billing could ease pain of health care costs

The ink was barely dry on last Sunday’s column when friend Tom Diffenbach sent me an article from the previous day’s New York Times about primary care physicians who bill their patients directly and save a ton of money on administrative costs.

The number of so-called “patient-centered” practices is growing, the newspaper said, because doctors find they can spend twice as much time with patients and cut their overhead by as much as half by using new technologies and avoiding the red tape of filing insurance claims.

One Seattle physician charges her patients a monthly fee of $54 to $129, based on age, and encourages them to purchase a high-deductible insurance policy for serious illnesses. She spends 30 minutes to an hour with each patient. Medical Billing Outsourcing