Quality medical care can be expensive. Unfortunately, even if you have health insurance, a serious injury or illness can still end up costing you a lot of money. If you’re without insurance, then you could find yourself in a real financial hole by the time you receive treatment. It’s why many patients will skip the medical care if they don’t think it’s absolutely necessary.
However, there is another option that might prove to be more affordable – urgent care. Although Urgent care is nothing new, many people still fail to consider urgent care for their healthcare needs, instead opting to go to emergency rooms that not only cost more, but often have longer wait times.
Many people think that urgent care facilities provide only the most basic of services for illnesses or injuries, but many of today’s urgent care facilities can provide a wide range of non-surgical procedures.
Emergency Room Costs
A trip to the emergency room (ER) can be quite expensive depending on whether you have insurance or not. Patients with health insurance will still have to pay a copay that’s typically upwards of $150. However, a lot depends on the type of plan the patient has. In some cases, they may have to pay coinsurance of ten to 50 percent.
This is no small number when you look at the actual costs of ER visits. Without any health insurance at all, patients can expect to pay anywhere between $150 and $3,000. This number depends heavily on what the issue is, what types of diagnostic tests were performed, what kind of treatment was received and more. In fact, for serious medical emergencies, the costs have been known to reach as high as $20,000. If you have an insurance plan that requires you to pay a percentage of this cost, then you’re still going to have to pay a huge sum of money.
Unfortunately, many people think that the ER is their only option – especially if they can’t see their primary care doctor right away due to scheduling conflicts. The fact that many ER visits end up not even being emergencies means that these costs could have been avoidable as well.
Urgent Care Costs
Urgent care tends to be a lot more affordable than the ER. First of all, our MEDIQ Urgent Care clinic will accept most major health insurance plans and will bill your insurer directly. Secondly, being treated at our urgent care clinic is nowhere near as expensive even if you do not have health insurance or a major health insurance plan that is accepted.
Our pricing is very straight forward, which means you won’t be surprised by a huge bill following your visit. All office fees cost $140, which will cover everything that we can do in-house. This includes services such as checking for illnesses, such as step throat, providing stitches and taking X-rays. Even when it comes to lab work, we provide a reduced rate – you’ll be able to pay for these labs individually as well, making it more convenient for your budget.
Considering how high the costs of an ER visit can become depending on whether you have insurance and what type of insurance plan you have, going to an urgent care clinic is typically much more affordable. Be sure to schedule an appointment or pre-register to make it easier to drop in without an appointment by contacting us at MEDIQ Urgent Care today.
