Some Doctors Letting Patients Skip Co-Payments

"For years, health plans have sought to control medical costs by negotiating fees with a group of preferred doctors and requiring patients to pay extra for going outside the network. But some doctors and clinics - eager to help hard-pressed patients or calculating that it can benefit their business - have begun to foil the cost-control efforts by waiving those extra charges."

Patients are seeing this as a sign of benevolence from their physicians. However, "Doctors are waiving coinsurance payments for several reasons, analysts say: to recruit patients who would otherwise go to doctors on a health plan's preferred list; to help people struggling with the cost of care, and to reduce their own costs for processing insurance paperwork and dunning patients who are slow to pay.

These doctors can afford to pass up the payments because the out-of-network fees they collect from insurers often are higher than those they would collect as members of a health plan's network."

Routinely waiving copayments however can be construed as fraud, according to this article. Hmm, I wonder what helped lobby put those laws on the books?

Just another example of how utterly screwed up our healthcare system is.