Why don’t we accept insurances?
We no longer accept insurances as we believe you deserve more with better quality of services and faster results. We value your time, as time can never be replaced. The faster you recover, the more time you will spend enjoying the things you love doing without pain or injuries.
We have stopped contributing to the failing system that does a little, but driving up health-care cost with minimal results. We don’t want you to feel rushed to being seen and not receiving the total care you deserve with repeated visits not getting you anywhere. Insurance coverage for physical therapy is a waste of money. Depending on your plan, some PPO insurance coverage still has up to $5000 deductible. Average injury should take no more than 6 visits to recover if the physical therapists knows what they’re doing. Unless you’re an athlete that gets injured every month, most people on average only visit a physical therapists maybe once a year. If you have a $500 insurance deductible, you will still need to pay out of pocket before your insurance will cover. If this is the case, then why even bother paying your monthly insurance premium when you only get injured maybe once a year. Most private physical therapy practices only charges $150 for evaluation, and $85 for subsequent visits. So basically you will only pay less than $600 for each injury considering you’re being seen up to 6 visits as a norm. If you have a higher deductible like $1000, you will never use your insurance to cover for physical therapy because you will need to first pay down your deductible.
Physical therapy insurance should be for higher risk individuals like athletes or for hard labor workers who gets injured frequently as part of their employer or union benefits package. This falls into the less expensive monthly premium, but probably the most inefficient HMO care system when it comes to physical therapy. Although the cost of co-payment and monthly premiums are much lower with HMO coverage, you basically surrender your health-care to insurance companies. You have no control of your health-care services. Your care is driven and dictated by physicians and pharmaceuticals. They make rules to make it harder and harder for therapists to get reimbursed for their hard earned under valued services. One method is threatening not to pay if documentation don’t support the services rendered under the insurance claim. This forces therapists to spend more time on copious notes and documentations (in most cases redundant information) than actually helping patients get better faster. Meanwhile, the very person who reviews and denies these insurance claims are only high school graduates. They just follow an algorithm. Should there be any inconsistencies with the claim, for example, the therapists addressing the hip, when the referring doctor wrote a prescription for the knee, they will automatically deny without considering the possibility that the two conditions maybe related to each other having the same therapy goals. Therapists who treats directly what the doctor refers to is a “rookie” or they don’t want to advance their clinical skills and approaches. Our body are interconnected. If one joint is not properly doing what it supposed to be doing, other body parts or joints will compensate. If you’re “beating up” the knee treating only the symptoms because that is what the doctor ordered without addressing the foot/ankle, or the hip, then the therapists did you a disfavor by preventing you from getting better faster pro-longing the problem. When the knee don’t get better, the doctor will resort to injections, and even surgeries, and in most cases people complain the relief was either temporary or worse having a new set of symptoms or dysfunctions. Unless there is a severe arthritis with knee deformity or traumatic injury that requires immediate surgical intervention, patients may still have pain, or sometimes the condition maybe over compensated with a new problem or movement impairments after any procedures. The answer maybe because the knee was never the cause of the problem in the first place. Unfortunately, local large teaching institutions including hospitals, foster this type of clinical practice that further drives health-care costs.
As long as these institutionalized therapists’ continues to make copious notes and being reimbursed, and doctors and family don’t complain, then companies don’t mind continuing to see the same patient regardless if they get better faster or not. If anything, they prefer patient to continue coming for a positive cash flow potentially over utilizing care. For some of these private clinics, there is no incentive for them to discharge patient early. This is more prevalent to physician owned practices or simply “POPS”, a self-referral for profit system where doctors or commonly a group of orthopedic surgeons who owns their own physical therapy practices making money by referring back to themselves. Most of these facilities runs like a “mill” or factory seeing a lot of patients at one time being herd through the system. Sometimes these patients has a minimum of 2 weeks waiting period before they even get seen. Its quite frustrating system for the patients. When these HMO patients maximizes their insurance coverage, and not getting better, these “POPs” clinics will continue to profit for injections, medications, MRI/X-rays exams, and of course surgeries. This what drives most of the health-care costs.
Primary care physicians are pathologists. They diagnosed diseases, and prescribed medications to resolve them. Orthopedics and other surgeons are trained to perform surgeries. Physical therapists are muscle and joint experts with emphasis on movement disorders and corrections. Why then would you go see your medical doctor for neck pain or sprained ankle? Is this a disease or a condition? It’s a condition. Physical therapists treats conditions to improve balance, function, strength, and movement performance. Similarly why would you go see an Orthopedic doctor when they’re surgeons? An orthopedic would not be interested in knowing your movement mechanics or dysfunctions for you to avoid surgery. A more ethical orthopedic would send you to a physical therapists, because they don’t have the time to bother explaining how and why you have the pain. Would you go see a dentist for your foot problem, or an optometrist for your ankle injury? Of course not.
This being said, physical therapist are not chiropractors, massage therapists, pilates instructors, or personal trainers. We are movement experts specializing in muscles and joint dysfunction to help an individual to return to his or her full functional capacity period. Some therapists likes to market themselves in other disciplines, but unfortunately, this further confuses the public potentially devaluing our services.
For these reasons, you should only have insurance for medical emergency only, or seeing a medical doctor after a serious fall or concussion for them to clear you for any nerve damage or muscle/joint tear or fracture that requires immediate attention for surgery in the hospital. Unforeseen chronic neurological conditions like stroke, Parkinsons, or spinal cord injuries requires a team of medical experts in rehabilitation centers for which having insurance is a blessing. Other than that, if you’re able to walk with maybe a limp, a physical therapists will most likely do the job well done. The U.S. Military are having physical therapists as primary care to help ailing or injured soldiers to recover faster. This has been well documented and proven its cost-effectiveness. If you end up in the hospital for accidents, or trauma, physical therapy will still be part of hospital care and will also be included with home-health services once you get discharged home. Once recovered, but still have some weakness or functional performance issues, you can still see a physical therapist on an outpatient basis to improve your functional strength for which you can pay cash out of pocket for wellness or physical maintenance until you are independent enough to do your own exercises.
Your healthcare experience should be happy and hassle-free!
