Medical Insurance for Self-Employed

• Medical Insurance for Self-Employed - vharmon
  • Sorry - I see you are an IC in the title My bad! NM - GotTheTShirt
  • What NOT to get! - GotTheTShirt
  • Don't know about Tennessee but when - sm

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but not sure how expensive it is or how much it costs to join NASE.  Their website is www.nase.org.

Good luck!

I am looking at moving back to working from home, I am currently 'in-house' working for a hospital clinic but I need more flexibility for my children's schedules.

I have a decent lead on an IC position, but I am trying to figure out if I can find/afford health care.  I really only need catastrophic type care and plan to pay for my own routine care.

Does anyone know of a decent insurance company??

Thanks VT_MT

Well, I am about to use my vision coverage insurance for United Health Care.  Eye Exam 2000 said they only covered 15-20% of the exam, 20% of cost of lens/glasses.  I have never heard of such a low amount covered.  I guess I have the wrong plan.  Anyone else disappointed with United Health Care benefits besides me?  I work for a large national.

Thanks.  I guess I am hoping someone will tell me I am wrong and that 80% of the bill is covered.  That this is all a mistake.

Signed,

Squinting

There are variables.  Is the person working 10-12 hours days and pretending they are working 8?  I know many who are.  If so, income should be considerably higher.  People with their own accounts can usually make 50-60K or more. 

For a 6-8 hour days, 5-day weeks, as an employee with experience, I don't think this job should ever pay less than $30,000.  It takes too much concentration, medical knowledge and complete isolation to pay any less.  Hospitals pay at least that and you are expected to take breaks, lunch, talk with other staff and physicians, get sick sometimes, have bad days and get bad authors sometimes, take vacations and generally be a human being.  Working from home, most of us hunker down and feel guilty if we have anything else we need to do, then making it up at all hours of the night or our supposed days off.   

Obviously, you work as an employee.  Sure hope you got a raise to change from what you were hired at.  Again, not all of us can be that flexible to just change.  We do have a life.  Furthermore, anyone can dial in and listen to a dictation on the weekend if they need it that bad.  Just call the floor get the identifying numbers, call the number, plug in the identifying patient info and badda bing, you've got the dictation.  It used to happen all of the time at the hospital I worked at because they didn't want to wait on the outside MTSO that was soooooooooooo slow.  TAT was never met or hardly ever.

you set your own line rate.  However, we all know that NONE of the MTSOs hiring IC MTs allow us to set our own rate.  They "offer" a rate, and we accept if it's OK.

I worked for a real cheapo doctor when I first started out.  He paid hourly and kept riding my backside to type faster because he only wanted to pay for the actual time dictated instead of the time it took to transcribe.  More than once I told him that it takes an average of 3:1 typing to talking ratio to get it done.  It worked out to be $.03 per line.  I dropped him like a bad habit.  He bounced through a few other transcriptionists who all quit on him before he wound up having to pay to outsource to a service.

There is a new type of retirement fund for self employed business people where you can put money in as both an employee ($15,000) and as a percentage of your profits as the business owner.  It is called an Ind 401K.  Here is a link...

http://www.troweprice.com/common/index3/0,3011,lnp%253D10264%2526cg%253D960%2526pgid%253D10057,00.html?scn=Low-cost_plans_with_&rfpgid=7622

I wanted to go with T. Rowe Price but they do not allow loans, so i decided to go with Oppenheimer.

I am a self-employed MT, trained by the office I have been contracted with for 9 yrs.  When I started, it was myself and an in-house Transcriptionist working for 4 physicians.  I gave a 24 hr TAT.  I had one 18-month-old child when I started, and was able to work around 6 hours a day.  I drove about 40 min to work and back, picked up tapes, working sometimes 6-7 days/week.  Since then, they have hired 2 more drs. and 3 NP's.  The in-house MT retired, but they did hire another MT who works at home.  I had another daughter, and a set of twins in those 9 yrs.  They have always known I try to work around my children's schedules.  As I am sure many of you do, I was getting up in the middle of the night working, working on and off throughout the day and at night.  The new MT and I are backed up now and we can't possibly get it all done.  It is more like 48-72 hr TAT.  They call all through the day asking me to stop what I am doing right then and search the tape, type the note and fax it ASAP.  I picked this profession to work around my children's schedules, not have to push them aside at every moment to cater to the office.  I do not have a certificate in MT, was just trained by this office.  I checked in to other places, but the pay is much less as I get paid 65 char/line including spaces at $.125/line.  The reason they pay so well is because they know I probably can't get on somewhere else with no certificate and no experience in any other field.  They want to make sure I stay there.  Also, the driving is ridiculous.  They refuse to get technology for telecommuting.  They refuse to hire someone else.  On top of that, I was just diagnosed with IST, and am on Toprol and not capable of working the hours I once did.  Is there anyone else out there who understands or has any advice?

Hi all. I am new to this board. I have a home based secretarial service and do both medical and legal. I have never worked for a big company, just attorneys and docs as well as sales profesionals with no secretary. I have always charged by the page, but I have a possible new client that wants me to bill her by the line. Is .12 per line reasonable or too little for medical? Are there any other home based self employed individuals who can offer advice on per line charges?

Thanks!

and Tessier's The Surgical Word Book, 3rd edition.  Books you could buy used I would say would be Stedman's Pathology and Lab Medicine and Cardiology/Pulmonary word book.  These are all the books I use the most during my day.  You could buy other speciality word books as you need them and could probably go used with those.

I wouldn't bother with buying a drug book, new editions come out every year and I just stick to the FDA website and RXList as my drug references.

Also FYI, not a book, but I use my Stedman's Electronic Medical Dictationary a lot.  It's easier to open the program than it is to pick up a huge 30-pound dictionary.

prefer OPs and have done MT work for about 16 years.  I have worked for MQ for 11 years for the Univ. of Pa. which they lost and now I am working for a small company in Michigan with just tons and tons of crap work.   I would like an IC job with OPs if possible. 

background and anatomy and physiology knowledge, a transition into coding wouldn't be hard at all.  From what I can tell by looking through my husband's books, an MT would have to learn insurance regulations and legalities.  We've basically got all the medical background down or we should be if we're worth our salt as an MT.

I even contacted AHIMA and found that the qualifications for taking the CCS or CCP coding exams are completion of the a coding program, RHIT program, or RHIA or related work experience.  Transcription is part of HIM, albeit the red-headed stepchild of the HIM department, but a part nonetheless and so satisfies the qualification of having work experience.

The test is tough though.  My husband didn't pass it his first time out and I think I read something like only 20% or so pass it the first time.  So it would probably be best to take some sort of formal coding class, in my opinion.

If you don't have insurance (dental, vision, prescription, chiropractic, and some locations medical) and don't have a lot to spend on insurance, ask me what I signed up for if interested.

There's a lot of information to tell and I don't want to ramble on if no one's interested.

Talk to ya later,

Andrea - Medical Transcripionist (Nashville, TN)