About our project
Perhaps now that Time Magazine has reported for 36 pages about the healthcare price transparency problem, people will stand up and do something about it. FairCareMD has been around for three years this past May. We are about to exceed 500,000 searches for care and have helped thousands pay and be paid fairly for care. Still, when it came time to crowdfund or pay for the service, very few wanted to pay for it and hence it moved from amazing business idea to hobby, from full service, to an ad supported site. Yet, we keep open the project because I always expect there to be a shift in mindset on the issue. I know I pay out of pocket and save thousands when I negotiate. If you are like me and want this network to keep growing, then please support it. We crossed half a million searches in March, so we know people want the system to work. Thousands have saved up to 75% on care using the system and Doctors still got paid better than insurance companies usually pay.
Please support the idea or suggest a reward that you would support. This is an enormous problem and we want to solve it for all. We have already poured years of our lives and much of our savings into the project. Angels and VCs do not want to fund such a disruptive solution, Doctors won’t pay for profiles and are expensive to get to sign up, and patients should not have to pay for fair prices, we think. That leaves advertising, employers, partners, and crowdfunding. We can also add in other related services. We are open to suggestions. What would you like to see? Tell us in the comments section. We are all ears.
Healthcare Pricing Isn’t Fair to Doctors or Patients
If you are paying for care yourself, you will generally be charged 2-10 times more than insurance companies pay for the same exact service. If you are a doctor it is even worse, the amounts paid by Medicare, Medicaid and your giant insurance companies are less than your average plumber makes for fixing a leak. Something in the middle would be much more fair.
Three years ago I fired my dentist because he wanted $250 for a pediatric check up for my kids, a price that I considered unfair. For years I had been negotiating on behalf of doctors with big insurance companies and knew that they were not being paid fairly either. In a system that punished price transparency brutally, there was no good solution. Government regulations and insurance company business practices made it difficult for fairly minded doctors to offer transparent pricing. Recent changes in both government and insurance company practices as well as increased consumerism from employers and patients looking for value and great care has changed how pricing is viewed and more people are requesting prices for care than ever.
This is why we created FairCareMD, to make an automated communication and pricing system for Patients and Doctors to work out prices that solves the problem elegantly and effectively. We built it and over 425,000 searches on the site have shown what it can do.
Early Results
What FairCareMD.com does is reduce the cost of care by up to 75% for patients paying cash. The other thing it does is get doctors paid better, faster, and with less overhead than government and insurance sources – about 26% better on average. So an MRI that might be listed at a price of $1,700 and is actually paid $350 on average goes for $492 on FairCareMD. Better yet, Early AM or Late evening specials often fill empty slots that are hard to fill. Unfortunately, only thousands have found what they were looking for because but not enough doctors are listed.
Plan of Action: FairCare EveryWhere
So we have a method to solve this problem but it will take some help. We have, thanks to the generous folks at RateMDs, Factual.com, and the US government, compiled a database of all the physicians in the country. We have set up basic profiles for each of them and attached them to likely offers.
We then let anyone request a price or appointment from any doctor anywhere in the US. Next we will call the doctor’s office and try to get the patient the requested price or appointment. We will also set the doctor up in the system to automate the process next time and flesh out her or his profile with more details. We believe this will make a huge open network for healthcare and SOLVE the healthcare pricing problem, making care fair for all Americans paying a significant portion of care for themselves.
How We Will Spend your Contributions
But we need your help to staff and train a call center and do a good deal of data entry. We also need to upgrade our servers to handle the huge website this will create. We have been growing organically for almost two years and this will let us scale this project rapidly and really do some good. FairCare, LLC is an employee owned company. We are programmers, doctors, and patient advocates working to make a change in a broken system. This is not big business and we will not be bought by big business, though many are emulating our model, albeit in their closed networks that one needs to pay dearly to access.
Please join us in this DIY approach to healthcare reform. If you are like me and 35% of Americans and are paying out of pocket for most of your care, using FairCareMD will save you 30% – 75% off your care. It works really well in NYC where I recruited my first hundred FairCareMDs but now I want every fair-minded doctor in America to get set up properly in the system. We are willing to give away subscriptions for free to fair doctors, but getting the word out and helping them get set up is the hard part.
Once we finish loading this version (adding more specialties every week!) all Medical and Dental providers in good standing are welcome to a free account on the site as well. Just go to www.FairCareMD.com, find your profile and claim it or just register, and fill in the blanks!
THANK YOU
Thank you for your help in fixing the price transparency problem in healthcare! If you have questions please do not hesitate to call us at (954) FAIR-CARE.
New and Improved Section!
We have learned a great deal since we started this campaign and have a few new offers for the Crowd That Cares about improving the healthcare system. Don’t see what you like? Suggest something new in the comments section and we will be right with you.
Custom Plans for Employers (New!)
We are happy to build a network for a self insured employer that will help you save millions. Just take the Employer Reward at the right and we will review your spending and develop a custom report that will help you figure out which services to target. Next, for a very fair price we will build out a network for you, put everyone on FairCareMD and let your folks access the fair fee network of great In Network providers that will take great care of your people. It is like having your own clinic once it gets going and will be a competitive advantage for your company.
How we help medical offices, clinics, doctors and hospitals
Your typical hospital spends millions every year on advertising. Dentists, podiatrists, and chiropractors bid up terms like “doctor visit”, “tooth ache” and Knee pain on google’s adwords and pay thousands per week for a few patients. Tens of thousands have signed up to pay ZocDoc 250 or more per month also for just a few new patients. These costs just add to overhead and perpetuate the problem inherent in our system that encourages price intransparency and higher costs.
Well, we hacked the system and figured out how to get to page one on Google for FREE. Yup, free. All you need to do is set up your practice on FairCareMD, explain your services well, and you will see your regular site rise in search engine listings like magic. Don’t believe us, search for any of our featured providers and the zip code they are in like “MRI 10007” and you will get Alpha 3T MRI. In some cases, if you have a number of providers you can get to page 1 multiple times. Plus the thousands of searches on the site
You can DIY it (Do It Yourself) or take the package at the right that fits and we will do it for you. You have the site for life and it will bring new patients both through FairCareMD.com and your regular site.
Once again, thank you for visiting. Please be welcome to peruse the other projects here on MedStartr. We would love to hear from you or add you to our newsletter list, so signin, signup, and become part of the solution!
Thanks,
Alex, Jacek, Jeremy, and Mike
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Have a question?
If the info above does not help, you can ask the project creator directly.
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