>Its the same tactic doctors use when dealing with medicare. I've been to several doctors that won't take it. The reasoning is obvious: your insurance company will just deny you and medicare will fight them to the bitter end on pricing.
I don’t think it’s a “tactic”, at least in that it’s not a maneuver meant to get the other party to do something differently or win a battle or something, it’s just frequently not worth it for the doctor to bother with insurance, in many cases. The insurance companies can make it arbitrarily hard to get paid, and they’ve gotten so far up there on that abusiveness scale that in many cases, it’s better for sanity, business, focus, etc to just lose those patients that have that insurance.
Source: I’ve worked on billing for a small doctor’s office that eventually decided to drop insurance altogether for life enjoyment rather than monetary reasons. It was incredibly painful working with eg some of the Blue Crosses. It made us want to just not deal with them, regardless of the amount of money, and we eventually did, almost purely for happiness reasons. Not dealing with insurance anymore was a big quality of life improvement. The patients could still file claims themselves, which let the insurance purchaser experience the product, and we always steered people towards Aetna when they asked about less horrible insurance companies, away from Blue Cross and UnitedHealthcare.
