How to Haggle with Your Doctor

These days, everything’s negotiable – even health care, if you know how the system works. You may be able to negotiate a 20 percent discount or more on costs at the doctor’s office. A few pieces of advice:

Where to start:
Never try to negotiate a medical bill without getting a bit of background information. Read the details of your current or previous insurance plan to get a sense of what will and won’t be covered in your upcoming visit.

It’s also worthwhile to find out what Medicare pays physicians—since it is usually substantially less than what they charge private insurance providers or patients themselves—to perform whatever procedure you’ll need. This will help you determine the bottom floor of what a physician will accept. You can do this by calling the doctor’s office, asking for the procedure’s “CPT code,” and going to the American Medical Association’s CPT search engine to look up the typical payment for that procedure based on where you live. When it comes time to bargain, it’s perfectly reasonable to offer a payment that is 25 percent above the Medicare rate for services…