Friends, can we please have a serious conversation about the cancer in our industry called Insurance!
I have presented many strategies and plans here in the Profit Report about Insurance and ways to transition away from it, to maximize accepting it, to straight-up beat it and to educate, influence, persuade patients over-above-and-around it.
So, you should have lots to work with already.
However – it continues to be the single biggest complaint and problem I hear from Dentists every single day, all day long. It results in working for less, having to earn and produce more, and with rising insurance based production levels and volume of patients the other thing that goes up is not your income it is your overhead necessary to support it.
That’s why insurance is a cancerous disease inside of our industry because it affects all parts of your practice: patients – production – profit.
I’d like to ask you to step outside of yourself, step away from your practice, step over your production and stare reality in the face … the real damage insurance will have on your Practice exceeds the 30%+ write-offs that you face and the pathetic reimbursement of your professional fees (that you’ve worked, studied, invested, sacrificed to be able to earn only to find out you are a dentist in a semi-socialist healthcare environment where other entities dictate treatment and your income instead of being a dentist in the free enterprise market you signed up for.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are three major problems with insurance and once you accept, embrace, and then strategically decide to beat, solve, out maneuver these three major problems you will instantly and quite literally immediately break through any plateaus and ceilings insurance has resulted in (self-imposed) limitations over your growth.
Please understand – as I have said time and time again – this is the same for fee for service and insurance payments and in network providers. Everything we are talking about applies to everyone; the only difference is who pays you and how much they pay.
So, don’t think just because you are not ‘accepting’ insurance or you are ‘out of network’ or you are ‘fee for service’ that you are not falling victim to these three problems.
You may not be, but let’s find out. And it’s all still very instructive – smart people pay attention and observe attempting to learn some takeaway from everything.
3 Problems of Insurance that all link together:
1st – Phases of Treatment, Layers of Profit, Cashflow
In essence when Patients say “yes” to insurance dentistry OR you base your treatment planning on it – you never give patients OR yourself a chance to get ‘phased’ or bundled treatment accepted to begin with.
Now, I’m an advocate for complete treatment plan presentation, which is the only way to really evolve your Practice out of low profitability, but the real important part here is when treatment is tied to insurance you never get to the layers of profit for the procedures you are doing.
Dentists don’t often grasp that the majority of their hourly value is getting used up in the overhead of the practice. If you take off ANY percentage of that to Insurance you are at a disadvantage.
Therefore, the only way to increase cashflow is to increase case acceptance of treatment that is done all at the same time – not over time.
Step by step dentistry (otherwise known as insurance based dentistry) tied to deductibles and “what’s allowed per year” nonsense will never result in profitable growth.
You either chose to break free from this or you don’t. No matter how many insurance plans you are on or if you are not on a single one at all; if you are not bundling complete treatment together, at the very minimum to quadrant based dentistry to phased treatment planning you are going to plateau and quickly reach a point of diminishing returns.
2nd – Production Completion, Time Value, Vicious Cycle
Tied directly to #1 is understanding that in Dentistry all you have is your time and what is done within the clinical hours you are chair side is what determines your time value. The faster you complete your production the more valuable your time can be.
BIG PROBLEM – when I say “faster” most very basic dentists who are still locked into the volume battle of trying to cram as many patients into their schedule as possible and run around on roller skates killing themselves – they immediately think speed of completing a procedure and while that’s somewhat important…
What really matters is that you have more procedures at the same time to complete. This is about time-value of leverage by turning over production dollars in order to break the cycle of your hourly average.
Case in point, if patients are choosing to do dentistry tied to insurance regardless what the reimbursement rate is they will do the least amount of treatment possible and that will result in your hours being limited in production value.
Bad news.
The best way to fix this is to increase your niche specialties within your practice and bring in procedures that do not have a time-money link to them requiring incremental growth per hour and thus breaking you away from the insurance cycle.
There are many other strategies here.
3rd – Conditioned Decision, Value of Care, Rinse and Repeat
Of course the most detrimental of all is when you let the cancer spread by allowing patients to become conditioned to accepting “wait until it’s an emergency” or one tooth at a time or “least amount for the cheapest price” type of decisions.
Once this takes root in your practice, you will be at the mercy of volume and you will very quickly realize that you have hit capacity and plateaued. You will wake up one, two, three maybe even five years later and you’ll have diminishing profitability with an increasing production and it will become apparent that patients are dictating your income by way of insurance based decisions, that’s been eating away at your practice growth.
You see, the least of the problem is the insurance reimbursement, it’s what patients choosing to do dentistry on the terms of insurance do to your overall ability to produce and profit in a time efficient manner in your practice.
The only solutions are to…
Decisively BREAK THE LINK BETWEEN CASE ACCEPTANCE AND INSURANCE.
Aggressively EXPLODE THROUGH THE CEILING of TIME BOUND PRODUCTION.
Confidently EMBRACE THE BENEFITS OF VALUE BASED DENTISTRY and accept nothing less.
If you’d like to receive a detailed training resource on my specific strategies to achieve each of these three solutions as realities in your Practice – email me at info@DentalSuccessToday.com with your sentiments on the state of insurance in the dental industry as it stands today and the impact it’s having on you (or other Dentists you know) and I’ll put you on the priority list to receive access when it’s released next month.
