Why Insurance-Based Physical Therapy is Not a Good Use of Your Time
Insurance-based physical therapy is a mess and the market is showing it. You’ve probably experienced this yourself.
Let’s paint a picture: you’ve been dealing with low back pain for the past 6 months. You haven’t slept more than 4 hours per night in weeks. Your relationship with your spouse is strained; you’re increasingly temperamental with your work colleagues and your family. You can feel your stress level rising and there’s no end in sight.
One-on-one attention can’t be beat!
You decide to take your family and physician’s advice to go to physical therapy. You’d like to use your health insurance, even though your health insurance benefit quality has declined and premiums have gone up since last year. You find an in-network PT provider but they don’t have any openings for 3 weeks. When you finally arrive for your appointment, you quickly realize that the place is overcrowded; patients are waiting 10 minutes to receive their next exercise from the rehab aide, and the aide is too busy to check your form so you’re not sure if you’re doing the exercises correctly. The physical therapists are running around, trying to avoid looking frantic.
In the room with the physical therapist, you feel rushed. The PT isn’t looking you in the eye and seems more interested in their next appointment or their upcoming lunch time, where they’ll try to play catch-up with their documentation.
This happens at your next appointment, and the next one, and the one after that.
Life is short! Why are you wasting your time in a clinic like this, whose sole purpose should be to make your back feel better, but instead appears disinterested in everything but your wallet?
You are more than a number.
This is why I opened Premier Physical Therapy as a fully out-of-network, cash-based PT practice. By treating you one-on-one, outside the constraints of your health insurance, we can efficiently treat the root cause of the problem. We give you the time and attention you need to treat your condition correctly the first time. That might mean 45 minutes of manual therapy, education, or therapeutic exercise that is always observed by a Doctor of Physical Therapy. You will never feel rushed and you will always receive highly-customized treatment.
I spent 6 years as a physical therapist in corporate and/or insurance-focused physical therapy practices before opening Premier Physical Therapy. I don’t blame the physical therapists and rehab aides, who are just doing their best to keep up with the insurance companies who reimburse less and less every year. The insurance game is exhausting. Healthcare providers are told to see more and more patients every month, to work through lunch, to stay late, and to spend hours of unpaid time every day catching up on paperwork. It’s not fair to the providers and more importantly, it’s not fair to the patients. Patient care ultimately gets sacrificed.
When you need an orthopedic issue treated, or if you’d like to maximize your musculoskeletal health and prevent injuries, Premier Physical Therapy is the only place for you. We get to know you, understand your background, and treat issues more quickly and effectively. That means we’re a significant time and money saver for you. All with the goal of reducing your pain and making sure your quality of life is as high as possible.
Take back control of your health. It’s your body after all, isn’t it?
Instagram: @premierptnc
Facebook: @premierptnc
980-766-9740