Surgery Center of Oklahoma Blog

Ever wonder why your physician recommends you to an out of network facility or refers you to a physician that is not in your insurance network?  Aggravated by this?  I challenge you to think of this situation another way.  The easy path for your physician is to refer you within the network.  He or she are likely operating under threats from the insurer or their network (usually controlled by a big hospital that may or may not employee them) but choose at some peril to their livelihood to refer you outside of the network.  Could it be that they believe that the right (best) place for you is out of the network and they are just wanting the best for you…that the best at a given specialty or field do not reside in the network in which they work?  Isn’t that what you want your physician to do?  Get you to the right people or to the right (best) facility?  Many physicians are risking their position in a network trying to do the best thing for their patients.  Hooray for these heros for doing the right thing…not the easy thing….a future post on the hostile takeovers of many physician practices by big hospitals coming soon.

G. Keith Smith, M.D.

Just as physician ownership of medical facilities eliminates the expensive middle men (the administration types) and results in a lower overhead and ability to offer lower cost and higher quality care, the elimination of the insurance or third party administrator middle men by contracting directly with the medical facilities can result in cost savings.  While this idea of “carve outs” is not new, it is not well understood by most of the businessmen operating self-insured companies that I have spoken to.  I hope that this concept can be explored more in depth as I believe it is a key to keeping costs competitive and low, quality of care high (by making the physicians and the facilities more accountable to the patients they serve) and maintaining the important relationship between the physicians and their patients that seems to be under siege from all directions.  As patients it is important for you to know if your physician is working for you or for someone else…they must be your advocate…more on this in another post.

G. Keith Smith, M.D.

I encourage anyone that has had surgery elsewhere to compare their bill with the prices posted on our website.  The prices listed include the facility, surgeon and anesthesia charges.   We are willing to extend this pricing to self-insured companies willing to think “outside of the box” with carve out type of arrangements.  Several companies have already discovered that they can save big by cutting their third party administrator out of the process and deal directly with our facility.

G. Keith Smith, M.D.

Welcome to the blog site for Surgery Center of Oklahoma!  Our facility is unique in having posted our “cash pay” prices online and we have attracted many patients with high deductibles or no insurance at all from all over the United States as well as from Canada.  We hope to have dialogue on this site that falls into the following categories:

Free market  health care

Transparency of health care pricing

Advantages of physician ownership of facilities

Medical Tourism

Comments from former patients

Again, welcome and we look forward to your comments.

G. Keith Smith, M.D.