Why PATMOS?
PATMOS means Payment At The Moment Of Service. We request that everyone treated at our clinic pay when they are seen. This keeps our overhead at a minimum since we do not have to incur the costs associated with medical billing. We then are able to pass this savings on to our patients.
Payment At The Moment Of Service can give patients the freedom to choose the physicians they want when they want. They are not herded into some pre-selected panel of healthcare providers that changes at their insurer’s whim. Patients are then free to manage their own care, while insurers can concentrate on managing risk.
Payment At The Moment Of Service can enable physicians to provide the highest quality of care without having to justify medical decisions to impersonal government and managed care bureaucrats who are neither qualified nor licensed to practice medicine.
Payment At The Moment Of Service forces patients to seek out the best value for their healthcare dollar. Likewise, it forces physicians to partner with patients in delivering that value. The addiction of both to OPM (other peoples’ money) – i.e. third party payers – is then broken. This change in mindset for both patient and physician, if applied to the hundreds of millions of outpatient doctor-patient interactions yearly, could result in significant savings in health insurance premiums for everyone.
Payment At The Moment Of Service is for routine medical expenses that should be anticipated as a matter of everyday living much the same way routine car maintenance is budgeted. Insurance, then, can cover the unexpected calamity or large medical claim. It seems that some people have been lured by the siren songs of low co-pays and medical deductibles and discover their mistake only too late. They crash on the rocks of personal bankruptcy because their particular ailment is excluded in their policy's fine print.
Payment At The Moment Of Service for small medical claims might currently be just a quaint, old-fashioned idea reserved for the fringe of the healthcare marketplace – people with high deductibles, religious medical cost sharing plans, or no insurance at all. However, there is a perceptible shift in the healthcare climate today fueled by increasing costs, patient and physician discontent, and people without insurance.
It should also be mentioned that PATMOS has other significance.
As it was a Greek island to which political prisoners were exiled during Biblical times, PATMOS is here today for the politically exiled within our healthcare system – the 47 million or so Americans without health insurance.
St. John was a prisoner there when he received "The Revelation." Like him, we at PATMOS EmergiClinic are here “because of the word of God and testimony of Jesus” (Rev 1:9 NASB). We believe they are the most healing and liberating forces on the planet.
