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

W

wigglethemouse

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
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
 
Last edited:
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.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
These sorts of fees sound potentially very exploitative, given that, as yet, in my view, there is no treatments bringing significant benefit, and certainly no evidence based treatments.
wigglethemouse said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Hutan said:
These sorts of fees sound potentially very exploitative
Click to expand...
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.
Screenshot_20250705-080425.png

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Kitty said:
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.
Click to expand...
It’s absolutely rampant in the US, there are hundreds if not thousands of little “integrative medicine services” that will set you up with a plan to meet with all their “specialists” (and charge you for seeing each one) and then keep loading you up with bottles of expensive supplements.

And people unfortunately flock to them because these are the only healthcare practitioners who seem to want to spend more than 15 minutes listening to what’s going on with you.

After being told for months that this is either psychosomatic/something that will go away if you exercise/something that doesn’t have any explanation, encountering a team of people who seem dedicated to helping you and have a multi-step plan of action seems like a lucky break. It’s only several thousand dollars and several months down the line when you realize you’ve been thoroughly scammed.

And of course they’re pros at weaponizing the whole “I don’t understand why you don’t want to pay for this, don’t you want to get better? It’s a small price to pay for getting your life back.” The worst part is that having interacted with many of these types, I’ve realized a huge majority of practitioners truly believe that they’re helping people. It’s only the deepest reaches of their subconscious that might admit to the ruthless exploitation they're doing.

Nobody cares about regulating it because it’s not covered by insurance anyways, so the only people losing money are the patients themselves.
 
wingate said:
$8,500 for 2 hours a month?!!
Click to expand...
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
Click to expand...
 
Chandelier said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
jnmaciuch said:
It’s absolutely rampant in the US, there are hundreds if not thousands of little “integrative medicine services” that will set you up with a plan to meet with all their “specialists” (and charge you for seeing each one) and then keep loading you up with bottles of expensive supplements.
Click to expand...

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?
 
The sad thing is that in my own experience, I wisened up to the fact that I was flushing money down the drain pretty fast. But if your only other option is to accept that you might just be stuck like this permanently, you’re going to keep trying whatever is presented to you just on the off chance that something works. I’ve seen it over and over again with friends in the early part of their illness.

These people are top class scammers, and they’ve also managed to find a population of people who are so desperate that they are willing to flush money down the drain even fully knowing that the next thing to try has virtually no chance of working.
 
Jaybee00 said:
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?
Click to expand...
I’ve wondered the same thing, and what I eventually realized is that these doctors genuinely believe that they’re helping people. I’ve talked to a lot of them who actually left traditional practices, or who started out as an MD with maybe a bit of leniency towards the more woo woo side of things. So many of them genuinely feel frustrated that they can’t do anything for their patients within the typical medical framework.

Unfortunately it seems like the solution to this feeling of failure is to generate a never-ending ambiguity machine where you can experience the positive feedback of a patient telling you that supplement #945 seems like it improves their bloating somewhat and they can walk away feeling like they did something good. These doctors realized that there’s nothing in the research to help their patients, and so they move over to the thousands of things that someone-once-said-might-help and spin theories based on poor understanding of the biology as to why it might work.

And when their patient eventually stops showing up because they finally realized that they’ve wasted thousands on nothing, the doctor never hears about it. They just move on to the next desperate person on their waitlist who treats them like they are lord and savior simply because they didn’t immediately blame the patient’s weight for all the symptoms and kick them out after 15 minutes.

And if the whole setup also happens to be a cash cow? Well how nice that those doctors are being rewarded for Genuinely Helping The People Who Slipped Through The Cracks Of Modern Medicine. [edit: they’ll say it’s such a shame that insurance doesn’t cover supplement #945 and they wish the “system” wasn’t so flawed but in the meantime they have to help these people somehow]
 
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.
 
jnmaciuch said:
But if your only other option is to accept that you might just be stuck like this permanently, you’re going to keep trying whatever is presented to you just on the off chance that something works. I’ve seen it over and over again with friends in the early part of their illness.
Click to expand...

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).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom