Priced out: Some Long COVID and ME specialists charge high prices for concierge care, The Sick Times

[wigglethemouse]

Priced out: Some Long COVID and ME specialists charge high prices for concierge care

Key points you should know:

* Prominent specialists treating complex infection-associated chronic conditions have stopped taking insurance, raised their rates, and/or moved to a concierge model, requiring patients to purchase expensive monthly subscriptions.

* The highest concierge fees range from $5,000 to $8,500 monthly, with treatments billed separately. Despite physicians charging high rates, patients struggle to receive consistent care from providers or affordable referrals when priced out of a specialist’s practice.

* Current health insurance models don’t work well for people with complex conditions — one of many factors that contributes to physician burnout.

* Rising costs and lack of insurance coverage are pushing some patients to digital healthcare platforms and virtual clinics, which also carry subscription fees of more than $1,000 a month.

* Patients priced out of care sometimes self-manage their treatments. A small but growing group of resources exist to help patients identify solutions without providers’ help.

The Sick Times LINK

 

[wigglethemouse]

Dr Ruhoy mentioned in the article is also with Atria Health and Research Institute, which according to the NY Post (Link) have a $100,000 initial fee and $60,000 annual fee.

Link to Atria Health page with Dr Ruhoy.

Dr Ruhoy is one of the Neurologists sending people for CCI surgery and has the webinars with Dr Kaufmann. It has been noted that she changes clinics frequently and seems to be listed at several.

Private Medical is also mentioned in the article with $30,000 fees.

 

[wigglethemouse]

Attached is the newsletter from the new practice Dr. Ruhoy founded called Anthurium. It has instructions for new and existing patients and the fees (excluding any treatment) mentioned in the Sick Times article (also LINK). The link to the newsletter is also on the Anthurium web page.

 

[Hutan]

These sorts of fees sound potentially very exploitative, given that, as yet, in my view, there are no treatments bringing significant benefit, and certainly no evidence based treatments.

Dr Ruhoy mentioned in the article is also with Atria Health and Research Institute, which according to the NY Post (Link) have a $100,000 initial fee and $60,000 annual fee.

Any doctor charging those sorts of fees has enough income to be conducting decent trials, for the benefit of their patients, and for people who can't afford to pay so much for care. I think they have a duty to be doing that.

 

[forestglip]

These sorts of fees sound potentially very exploitative

Holy cow. On first read, I thought those were fees a doctor paid to be allowed to practice in and get patients from this health network. Who can afford that??

Here are Dr. Ruhoy's fees. For the most value per dollar: $8500/month to get 2 hours of time with her per month, 45 minutes with a physician's assistant, "Active Collaboration with Patient’s other Providers", "Direct-to-Provider Concierge" whatever that means, and 10% off treatments. So they still have to pay for treatments on top of this.


I guess if it's all millionaires who can afford it, it's fine. But I wonder how many people are dumping large parts of their life savings on this.

 

[wingate]

$8,500 for 2 hours a month?!! I would be very interested to know what salary that translates for her. This exorbitant rate is highly disturbing.

 

[rvallee]

Thanks again to psychosomatic quacks for all the secondary gains they allow. It's not just the insurance industry they are enriching here. None of this would be happening without all their fraud and lies.

 

[Jaybee00]

This is pretty outrageous. Here is the bio of one of the other doctors at Ruhoy’s clinic. I guess she has moved away from treating the most marginalized patients…..

Tanmeet Sethi, MD​

Board-Certified Integrative Family Physician
Tanmeet Sethi, MD is a board-certified Integrative Family Physician, Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Washington, author of Joy Is My Justice: Reclaim Yours Now (Hachette, 5/2/23), and TEDx speaker who has dedicated her career to care for the most marginalized patients in Seattle’s refugee, uninsured and homeless populations as well as global communities traumatized by manmade and natural disasters as Senior Faculty for the Center for Mind Body Medicine. She has had a long career in Integrative Primary Care and now specializes in Integrative and Psychedelic Medicine.

 

[Jaybee00]

And here working to upend systems of oppression.

Welcome, I’m Tanmeet Sethi, MD–Physician, Activist, Author, and Speaker, all of my work with the mission to upend systems of oppression.

https://www.tanmeetsethimd.com/

 

[Yann04]

That’s just disgusting.

Co-opting activist anti-establishment language to sound like an ally while grossly enriching yourself at the expense of a marginalised group without offering the community any benefits.

 

[wigglethemouse]

It's well worth reading the Sick Times article. I really feel for patients that just had surgery/treatment and then hit with these new fees, wondering who will support them with the recovery stage, especially after major surgery.

 

[Kitty]

This sounds far-fetched to someone who's only experienced socialised healthcare. An organised system of exploitation, where the fees may be hundreds of times more than the cost of the services received.

Makes me wonder if there are international drug cartels that operate with less ruthlessness.

 

[Chandelier]

$8,500 for 2 hours a month?!!

Well, according to Dr Kaufman in their latest Unraveled podcast on YouTube they can get many of us to 80%+
Honestly, listening to this naively as a desperate ME/CFS sufferer, I‘m more than willing to go broke for the rest of my existence if they can get me back to living some sort of a life.

[Starts at 24:06]

[Question:] all right Um for a young 22-year-old who has had 10 years of neuroinflammation starting with untreated pans pots now
ME/CFS myalgia diagnosis is there hope with the appropriate treatment that she will lead a normal life again perhaps getting rid
of psych meds fingers crossed does the blood brain barrier disruption here heal

[Dr Kaufman]

all right I I want to dive into this go
okay so the easy answer is um what's been done for your untreated pans pots
uh pans okay pans pots um I I mean my my real answer is I think
there's every reason to work plan and act as if you can regain a normal life
otherwise this stands for Eileen i wouldn't be doing this right and Eileen wouldn't be
doing this okay um we do not believe these are hopeless diseases and hopeless situations that doesn't mean we can cure
everybody it doesn't mean that every ME/CFS patient will regain 100% of functionality it absolutely means that
many many many can get 80% 90% 95% um
and I think it's a matter of how hard your physicians and you the patient look
and push to see if everything's been done if you had PANS did they check to see if you had tickborn infections or
did they just treat for strep if you had PANS could you still have ongoing neuroinflammation and has that is that
being addressed in an ongoing way uh you know the problem as everyone who's
listening knows there just aren't enough physicians who are thinking this way and open to pushing the envelope and and you
know stepping outside the box and going on to AI perplexity and Google and
learning what they don't know so they can continue to take care of patients and so it really depends a lot
unfortunately on the patient being an advocate and bringing that stuff to the doctor

 

[Yann04]

Well, according to Dr Kaufman in their latest Unraveled podcast on YouTube they can get many of us to 80%+
Honestly, listening to this naively as a desperate ME/CFS sufferer, I‘m more than willing to go broke for the rest of my existence if they can get me back to living some sort of a life.

Yet there’s no reason to believe them.
If they actually had some magic that worked, they’d surely run a successful stufy with the money they have.

 

[Jaybee00]

Responding to a deleted post about integrative medicine practices in the US and their expensive specialisms and selling supplements.

I don’t really understand why the physicians themselves are attracted to this line of work. They could make just as much money in a regular, conventional practice.

To get to be a physician in the U.S., you have to be pretty smart—you have to do well in high school, get very good grades in undergrad, get accepted and complete medical school, complete residency, etc. Why do all that to hawk supplements and endless testing?

 

[forestglip]

Probably good for business that many people recover from long COVID naturally after a few months. If they happened to be seeing one of these doctors at the time, it'd be easy to mistakenly connect recovery with one of their treatments and then spread the word.

 

[Kitty]

Responding to deleted post about patients being willing to try any supplements when the alternative is staying sick.

Yeah, but here people are wasting twelve quid on a bottle of vitamins—that's quite bad enough for something that's never going to work.

An NHS doctor can't help because they know there's no treatment, but at least they're not going to send a bill for that advice. They can also advise them the water they're swallowing supplements with is probably as effective on its own (that's a quote from the GP of someone in a local ME/CFS group).

 

[wingate]

Well, according to Dr Kaufman in their latest Unraveled podcast on YouTube they can get many of us to 80%+
Honestly, listening to this naively as a desperate ME/CFS sufferer, I‘m more than willing to go broke for the rest of my existence if they can get me back to living some sort of a life.

I am skeptical of this statistic that he’s getting people back to 80%+, and unfortunately, we can only take his word for it, because he and other doctors making these type of claims don’t have rigorous trials to indicate what’s happening one way or another to their patients.

I think for docs like Ruhoy to be charging $4,250 an hour, there should be some compelling evidence that what she offers is going to help the patient.

 

[Holinger]

It is a scam dressed up as evidence based medical treatment. Most ‘intergrative doctors’ push the regulatory boundaries the same way.

 

[Chandelier]

If they actually had some magic that worked, they’d surely run a successful stufy with the money they have.

Yeah, from what I gather, their magic pill is the „septad“. It’s a diagnostic process that’s explained in more detail in this post over at HealthRising.
They also did an entire episode about it on their Patreon, which they made freely available a few months back.
They are currently in the process of moving all their Patreon stuff to their YouTube channel.