Insurance is calling me to schedule a free in-house med checkup???

[madanitsuj]

@romanianpentecostal I'm not in a higher risk group, I'm very healthy, I'm up to date on all of my well visits, I don't take medication, and I'm under 60 years old. I don't need another checkup/home visit. Something is up and someone is profiting off of this. And I wonder too why they want to come to my home so badly. The caller today was so freaking persistent. And to offer me money to allow them to visit sounds very fishy

 

[pilgrimseeker]

@deanerenata32 This is the right answer. I work in insurance also and they’re promoting a program, possibly one that is newer or part of some initiative to push preventive care to reduce the potential for as much inpatient or emergency care as possible. I wouldn’t overly worry about it and of course you can always decline, and even opt out of telephone communications if you like.

 

[bigdawg35]

@romanianpentecostal I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you’re going to start seeing hospital at home services crop up across the country.

A part of this is giving offices and hospitals, space for patients who truly need to be inpatient.

They shouldn’t be billing you anything outside your regular copayments. If so you can an appeal the bill.

 

[romanianpentecostal]

@bigdawg35 True, along with the rise in telehealth becoming ubiquitous. I see it a lot more though with these contracted agencies that send H1B Filipino caretakers for aging boomers. I guess I thought it strange to send licensed professionals to young people’s apartments unsolicited, but maybe that’s the future.

 

[bigdawg35]

@romanianpentecostal I just reread your post, were they treating this as an annual physical or a wellness visit?

You can look up your EOC also known as evidence of coverage through your insurance website, and it’ll breakdown what’s included in your plan and the copayments.

They could be reaching out to members and offering the service free of charge to capture data so they can offer it at a larger scale as well.

 

[thavener]

@romanianpentecostal I know of health plans that do this. Is it a dual Medicare/ Medicaid plan? Insurances always want to make preventative care as easy as possible. Because it is always 10x cheaper to keep you healthy than to pay for emergency care. They will probably take your vitals and counsel you about health food and exercise. Hopefully, they will also offer you a blood draw for lab work.

HIPAA is a real thing. The info gain will only be used for your treatment or aggregated and anonymotized to prove program effectiveness.

You can always decline. They will leave you alone, if you keep telling them to go away or if you ignore them.

 

[romanianpentecostal]

@thavener I did think of this too, that their actuaries have calculated that if a physical in-home check-up can prevent some later treatment, this would be profitable, it just seems unbelievable that it would be profitable to spend ~1k or so to send someone out to a healthy 30 y/o, you’d have to think they’d need 1% of those visits to result in some miraculous preventative care. In this dream scenario it’s like they find someone looking jaundiced and living in a dump surrounded by mold and oblivious to it. I could see it viable with elderly chronically ill patients, but they should be on Medicare/medicaid usually anyway.

I’m not on Medicare or anything like that.

 

[erin30ga]

@romanianpentecostal FWIW it doesn't cost them $1000 for a visit as they these people are on salary and no doubt can do a fair number on their rounds.

When my father was on Medicare he did get various home visits in terms of checkups - not for anything specialized but essentially for the kind of visit that is theoretically "free".

They are pretty good at spotting stuff that might otherwise go undetected. My father's breast cancer was spotted on one of these home visits because he didn't think it was anything significant and even though he had been to some doctors for some reason none of the visits had him with his shirt completely off.

 

[romanianpentecostal]

@erin30ga That’s nice, glad your family got something out of that and they were able to detect it. That kind of thing would be good for my dad too honestly as he’s stubborn about getting anything checked.

I suppose I’m thinking of the whole infrastructure, I’m sure it is run as efficiently as possible, but the labor for 1-2 hrs of a doc/NP, the call center, overhead, insurance, mileage, vehicle, payroll, can’t be cheap. I’d actually be surprised if they are salaried, now that I think about it, sounds like a decent 1099 gig, but what do I know. Except that it makes sense to do these for elderly medicare patients because you’re likely to find something like in your case, and also because the federal govt is giving you a blank check, but don’t get why they’d push it on people indiscriminately (or maybe they chose me for a reason I’m not seeing)

 

[erin30ga]

@romanianpentecostal These visits don't take one or two hours - they are on a schedule where they maximize how many people they can see.

If you get a well check in the doctor's office, you probably get face time with the doctor for five or at most 10 minutes.

The rest of the administration/overhead is less than for a doctor's office which has rent; medical machinery, bathrooms; waiting room; receptionists; nurse etc.

I don't know about you specifically of course - maybe if you haven't seen a doctor for awhile? Or maybe you are part of a pilot program to see whether results are better?

My father was on a pilot program where they gave him a scale that was hooked to the internet and every morning he weighed himself. This wasn't for weight control but for early detection of heart and kidney issues since those result in fluid build up and would register as a sudden weight gain.