Why don't you take insurance?
I have been practicing chiropractic for the past 12 years and have seen lots of different ways that chiropractic offices operate. Some offices have lots of doctors; some only have one. Some offices have a front desk person, billing specialist, and chiropractic assistants, while other offices operate with only the doctor and no staff. Some offices are huge with a dozen treatment rooms while others may operate out of a mobile trailer. One of the perks to being a chiropractor is that there are lots of different ways to run the business, and each way attracts different clientele.
After working in several different models of offices, I found out a lot about the things that I loved, but just as much I learned about the things that I did not want to mimic in my own office. The most obvious thing that I did not want to do was deal with health insurance. The main reason that I chose not to take insurance is that your insurance company dictates your care without ever really knowing you. They decide whether or not you need medical imaging and how many visits you get without knowing what conditions you have. Treating someone based on what their insurance company is willing to pay for is not what is in the best interest of the patient. The other main downside to insurance is that it is almost always more expensive than our payment model. Insurance co pays average around $50 per visit while deductibles have skyrocketed to the thousands, sometimes even more than $10,000.
Instead, a self-pay “membership” style is what I adopted. This system allows you to pay a flat monthly fee for all of the visits that you need. My recommendation is that healthy people get adjusted once per week for maintenance. Under the average co-pay system, that would be between $200-$250 per month for care. In my system it is only $110 per month with the perk of being able to come in even more often if you are having a bad week or get injured. This way, patients come in when they actually need to, instead of wondering if their back hurts bad enough to warrant paying their $50 co pay.