Quote:
Originally Posted by aiea  Hi,
I am wondering how vaccines and $ work. Does a doctor pay for a shipment of vaccines and then hope to sell them to patients? And if they are not sold by the expiration date, then the profit is lost?
|
Our doctor orders them over from the pharmacy when they are required, in the amount that is expected to be required. That is why some peds want your schedule written down if you're vaxxing on a delayed schedule--they need to know what to bring in for your child's scheduled appt at $month. (And we've actually run into problems with this--my husband wanted Hep A and B due to the areas of the world he travels to, they don't keep them in the office and have to order them in so he could start the series . . . and they forgot.)
I'm sure there are other doctors that operate differently though.
From what I've seen on our EOBs, our doctor gets paid (by insurance) about $60 for a well-child appointment, plus about $25 per standard childhood vaccine. I'd have to double-check to see if there have been any higher reimbursements than that, but I really don't recall having seen any. But we haven't opted into any of the "new, recommended but not required" ones and those are the ones that tend to cost more.
(Oh, and that $25 is the high I recall seeing. I read through all our EOBs when they arrive, and something--I don't recall which one--was reimbursed at $8, a few at about $10-15.)
That wasn't what insurance paid, I'm sure, but I was just mad as H3LL that they were charging that much for something I felt hoodwinked into getting in the first place! They were lucky insurance covered it, because I would have fought tooth and nail not to!
