Healthcare Providers and their Uncollectibles

Medical debt is different than that of other industries; where a landlord does not want a delinquent tenant back, doctors want to continue to care for their patients.  They simply want to be paid for the services they provide. Whereas doctors previously were reluctant to send their patients to a collection agency, today they find themselves facing a climate of  persistently declining revenues and increasing expenditures compelling them to look to all avenues for recovery of lost profits, including collection agencies.

 “The doctors we work with are not seeing less demand for their services,” says FMS Managing Director Jeffrey Hausfeld, himself a physician, “but they are finding their collections to be a major burden and clear hit to their bottom line.” 

Unlike other collection companies, FMS is the only agency actually managed by a doctor, with an MBA.  Dr. Hausfeld has specially trained the FMS collectors to understand the delicate balance between effective collections and maintaining the doctor-patient relationship.  The company specializes in implementing a state-of-the-art debt collection solution that gives physicians, dentists, and their staff the ability to submit debt electronically, track collection progress, and easily manage accounts. 

The larger question may be why patients don’t pay up. It seems that once the bill is paid in part by an insurance provider, many patients don’t feel obligated to pay the balance. In some cases it would appear that the patient believes that the insurance payment was the “true fee” and the excess will be written off by the doctor if they just ignore it. Does this attitude just fuel the fire of rising health care costs?

Having a collection company that understands that part of the problem is communication and having that company run by a physician may indeed be part of the solution. Down the road, so would a better system, but alas, one solution at a time is better than none at all. Since the doctor’s fees are usually capped by the insurance company, they are restrained in their ability to increase fees to patients. Bad debt simply puts too much additional stress on a system that is in jeopardy of imploding due to the impending wave of baby boomer Medicare recipients, and increased cost shifting from employers to employees.