Letter to NewLeaf Health Care Patients…
October 24, 2024
My dear patients,
I have something very important to share with you. I hope you read the full explanation. In case you don’t have time, here’s the punchline…
I am moving to a membership form of practice, completely away from insurance.
Why?
Two things.
First, you deserve the care that I want to give and the time that it takes.
Second, I believe I deserve a salary, and in 2024 the insurance model didn’t reimburse me enough to pay myself. Something has to change.
However, I’m keeping my functional medicine membership costs quite low by many standards, because I truly want to help.
Now, there’s so much more to the story, though.
Here’s the longer version…
The setup is knowing a little about my history as a physician:
I was trained in conventional allopathic medicine (regular medical school in the US – think MD’s and DO’s), at some of the best training institutions.
In my training as an Obstetrician, I encountered training from both midwives as well as senior obstetricians (WHICH WAS A ONE-OF-A-KIND, NEVER-BEFORE SITUATION). From the beginning, I understood that while allopathic medicine approaches what it does as if it is DOCTRINE, in fact they were teaching us a very skewed piece of healthcare: one that was disease oriented, and not geared toward cure or restoration of health, but toward help with symptoms and disease MAINTENANCE.
On the other hand, Midwifery had the approach that pregnancy and childbirth were natural, NORMAL conditions, and most cases can be managed by watching nature work and helping that along, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME BEING THERE TO HELP IF SOMETHING WENT WRONG.
I realized that apart from the midwifery-leaning natural approach I took in my practice of obstetrics, the remainder of the care I provided to patients was disease-oriented.
That’s when I moved towards functional medicine, where I was able to get to the root causes of health problems and help patients return to health rather than manage disease. And furthermore, I can now look for potential future problems, such as a patient’s most likely cause of death and then do what is needed to avoid that problem.
In that move, I committed to setting aside an hour to see patients, so that our time together was an EXCHANGE. I needed to hear the patient before I spoke to them.
- So, what did this mean for the financial aspect of my practice? Here’s some simple math…
- What a physician makes for a time-based visit for 15 minutes = $1X.
- What I can bill insurance for one of my appointments is $1.5X (as long as it’s 45 minutes or longer).
- A normal physician’s office is making $1X x 4 visits per hour = $4X per hour.
- My practice is making $1.5X per hour.
I knew this as I made the switch and accepted the sacrifice when I made this decision. It only seemed right, because many people are provided insurance by their employers as part of their compensation, and in order to make budgets work, they needed to utilize their insurance as much as possible.
Now, however, employers are struggling to provide insurance because costs have skyrocketed. As employers have paid more, I know that employees have also had to pay more, as represented in their portion of premiums and in very high deductibles. All the while, reimbursement from insurance companies has either remained flat or decreased.
The amount of money that I am paid for that one-hour block of time is no longer sufficient to cover the office overhead. 2024 has proved again to be a year in which, by the insurance model, I have not been able to pay myself a salary. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first year this has happened.
For this reason, I am changing my practice to a membership form of practice.
I have priced the membership at a fraction of what other functional medicine practices charge. As a personal example… I have seen a functional medicine provider in Texas whom I paid $750 for a 60 minute visit. On one other occasion, I have consulted with an ENT specialist in New York and paid $750 for a one-hour visit. AND THEY GAVE ME ANSWERS NO ONE ELSE HAD EVER BEEN ABLE TO, AND MY PROBLEMS WERE SOLVED! WELL WORTH IT!
The first membership option is a low monthly membership fee of $99 with a charge of $250 for each individual visit. Or, someone can choose a $350/monthly fee with $0 appointment charges. You can see this is a huge difference in how most functional medicine practices are paid.
Let me be clear — I am not doing this because I think my services are less valuable than other functional medicine providers. In fact, my patients would tell you it is quite the contrary. My patients receive close individual attention, are known by me and my staff, and we see them through from illness to health, or through a process of AVOIDING illness. Many have considered my services INVALUABLE.
In these hard times we are living in, I am doing this because I believe this country is not going to be able to pull through to better times unless we are willing to pull together.
Many of you have experienced financial hardship these past 4 years. I have as well. Let’s pull through this so that we can get what is needed and pull together as a people.
You deserve access to excellent healthcare that gets to the root of the cause, and I deserve to make enough money to pay the bills. I am willing to take a financial hit as my patients also take financial hits, because we are all working together as a people to pull through these hard times.
For my current patients, I hope you will join us in the membership based practice. I think if you reflect, you will see this is worth it. As times get more difficult, remember that none of us reaches any of our goals if we do not have our health. Set your health as a priority, and you give yourself the chance to be rewarded.
For more information on membership, or to register, visit our registration page, or call our office at 509-571-1300.
Thank you for your trust and support,
Renee Woods, MD