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Comment by asn0 | Hacker News Reader

I've negotiated direct-pay prices several times with auto-body shops, but I haven't tried with doctors.

Are most doctors set up to provide cash quotes and accept cash payment, or would I need to find specific doctors if I want to pay cash?

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I have never seen a private practice that couldn't handle cash payments such as credit cards and, well, cash. They may not be set up to handle Stripe or Google Wallet, but they may be and not even know it. I have a friend who's father, an internal medicine doc in North Carolina, has actually taken farm animals in payment.

Ironically, for businesses that operate under HIPAA regs, any doctor I've had take my credit card had paper forms that were nowhere near PCI compliant.

> nowhere near PCI compliant

This I do not doubt at all...

My favorite - I had a routine-but-niche lab test done at a doctor I'd never been to before. They wanted a credit card "on file" in case insurance didn't pay.

They had a paper form for my name, address, SSN, credit card number, and even the CVV2 code off the card. I left the SSN and credit card info all blank, handed them the form and the card and told them I wasn't comfortable writing it all down (at least if there was a breach, it's not in my handwriting, right?). Which then got put in a pile on her desk until god knows when.

Insurance paid for the test ... at their negotiated rate of under $3. For that, I would have just paid cash and saved having personal information left laying around.

Very few doctors are set up to provide cash quotes. You are more likely to find this situation in primary care (general practitioner) than other specialties since you are more likely to use your primary care physician on a regular schedule.

If you are looking for a practice that is set up near you this site has a map of DPC practices across the US. https://www.dpcfrontier.com/mapper/

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