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I have to admit up front that I know little about how insurance companies reimburse providers. Be assured, I agree with what you are saying. Unionized workers think they are entitled to a lifelong guarantee that they will never have to spend one penny of their own money for any kind of medical treatment - medical, dental, vision, hearing, etc.

Why does a doctor choose to see the patients of an insurance company that pays so little? Can the doctor not require the patient to pay the balance, or part of it?

is what happens when you pay NOTHING out of pocket

That is soooo true of every give-away program - Medicaid, Food Stamps, welfare, etc.

"Why does a doctor choose to see the patients of an insurance company that pays so little? Can the doctor not require the patient to pay the balance, or part of it?"

Because of the referrals. We are a referral based root canal specialty office. Yes, we also get a lot of patients who will only use our office because of the 2 great doctors we have and because of us staff.

Unfortunately, when you sign up with any insurance, we participate with a few PPO's as well, you agree to their fees and must abide by them.

UWF had no out of pocket expense for the patient, unless they hit their max for the year. This DDS happened to be our 2nd biggest referral; however, it already looks like he was bumped to 3rd. I run the numbers every quarter for the top 50 DDS's. Net prod, net coll., how many root canals started and completed and the average per rct.

We also have a lot of private pay patients as well. We are expensive, but our overhead is tremendous and the boss has worked his fingers to the bone to get his practice to what it is today.