Medicare

At Co-Psych I will not be taking new patients who wish to use their Medicare coverage as payment.  If you wish, you may pay "out-of-pocket" using the "per minute" system and try to be efficient. 

However, for my existing patients with Medicare, I will continue to provide services.  Those services will be billed at current rates; however, for patients who cannot afford those rates, you may pay what you can, and we will try to be efficient with the time we use. 

Other Community Psychiatric Services

In my opinion, Medicare is a broken system.  But in case somebody thinks that opting out of Medicare is a violation of a public expectation -- a fair concern --  here are the other ways I'm "paying back" the social obligation:

• taking phone calls from primary care doc's who have a question about a patient they're seeing
• arranging a "consultation" system for primary care physicians  
• volunteering at our local free clinic monthly, including teaching pharmacists and nurse practitioner students there occasionally
• answering questions at BipolarWorld.net once a week, now with an archive of hundreds of Q's/A's
• maintaining PsychEducation.org:  a website with extensive, updated, referenced medical information which can be used without charge
• working on a system for training more psychiatrists and nurse practitioners in our area, including an arrangement for seeing patients with Medicare