I think let’s first of all define what insurance is.
Most people have an idea of what they call health insurance, but we personally don’t believe there’s anything that is such a thing. Here’s what I mean by that…
Do you have homeowner’s insurance? Well, when does it pay? It pays when you have some catastrophic occurrence at your house.
Do you have car owners insurance? When does it pay? When you get in a crash or something. When you have something go wrong with your car.
Do you have life insurance? When does that pay? When you die.
So if you have health insurance, the question you must ask yourself is this: “when does it pay?” Well it pays when you get sick and that’s what it’s for, to cover catastrophic occurrences to the human body. Just like catastrophic occurrences to your car.
So the analogy shows that there’s no such thing as health insurance because it doesn’t pay you to keep you healthy. It’s designed to pay the bills when something goes wrong.
Just like car insurance when you crash your car, it’s designed to fix the car when something goes wrong. But what about keeping the car or your human body in a good place or healthy?
Well, car owners insurance is not going to pay for you to change your tires, put air in your tires, put gas in your car, keep it clean, or change the oil.
Well this is what we do at FMI. We are ones that understand the human body, so we’re trained mechanics in that way. We want to teach you how to maintain your health. Therefore, your health insurance is not going to pay for that.
That’s kind of how you have to look at that. The health insurance system is not designed to treat multiple conditions at the same time. It’s not set up to pay for a lengthy visit.
Our design of healthcare is to have lengthy visits, to cover all aspects of health, and get to know you so we can understand the way your body functions. And when we do that, we’re able to give you a treatment plan to get it well.
Our idea of insurance or health insurance is totally different. We think health insurance is keeping you out of the doctor’s office, and we want to teach you how to do that.
We do use health insurance under one condition and one condition only. When we can minimize the expenditure that you pay for labs.
But here’s the thing…. when a person does a lab and runs it through insurance (that are in network), that insurance company gets a bill from the lab that’s probably five to eight times higher than the lab costs to do. And they’re going to try collect that from your insurance company, and therefore the labs make a boatload of money.
Not bad for them, but bad for you because they’re going to take your deductible through that process. So if your deductible’s not met, they’re gonna submit that bill, five to eight times more than what it costs and they’re gonna snatch that deductible.
So we have an idea that we’ve been able to employ. There are some off-shoot labs that are typically out of network that will still try to collect from your insurance company, but if they don’t, they don’t back-bill you.
They don’t get into your deductibles so you’re just out a minimal co-pay, which is pretty cool. So we’re able to get some really extensive labs, out of network, for just a minimal co-pay.
Those situations are really outliers and they’re rare, but nonetheless, we do use those and we’re very up to speed on those things when we do.
Insurance is not going to be used to pay for our time. Our time is, as I said earlier, extensive. We’re not going to spend 10 minutes with you, we’re not going to spend 15 minutes, we’re going to spend some significant time with you so we can get to know you.
So we’re not talking about a sick care situation at FMI. We’re talking about a healthcare situation, or a well care situation. That’s the difference.
So the short answer to the question: We take insurance for labs where appropriate conditions apply. And we provide a direct care model because we truly enjoy taking care of you.