I doubt that we need to take up a collection.
Insurance companies!!! They gotta be dismantled. Health insurance must be outlawed, seriously. A doc who operated on my knee, got something like $150 for the surgery. Even anesthesiologist got more. What a joke!
It's because she makes money as a plastic surgeon that she can even afford to take on the Medi-Cal patients who chew up days of her time for a total of $83.50. Of course the $83.50 does not include the equally pathetic amount she will be paid for performing the surgery and doing follow-up visits, but the principle is the same: there is no way she can consider caring for Medicare and Medi-Cal patients anything other than charity. The costs of maintaining her office, paying her staff, and paying the staggering amount in malpractice insurance she has to carry also aren't even touched by the money she makes from this charity care.
And what she says in her article about the problems of medical coding is true. She is billing a 99213, an extended visit, for the time she spends telling the patient about breast cancer options. That number implies that she's spending 20-30 minutes with the patient. The truth is she is spending far more time, perhaps an hour or so, and then may have to devote additional time to fielding phone calls from the patient. She should have billed 99215, a CPT-4 code involving much more time, but Medi-Cal would have rejected the claim altogether if she had.