Medical Billing

Medical Billing is one of those business opportunities that is a real business but is much harder than the sellers of these systems would ever let on.

You will see ads selling business opportunities for the ability to do medical billing at home. As you explore further you will find that you can make $50,000 to $100,000 a year processing medical claims for doctors' offices.

The sales piece (or whatever you are looking at) will tell you that many small doctors' offices don't have the staff to process all the insurance claims that they receive and would be happy to pay you between $5 and $10 a piece to do the processing for them.

While all this sounds great, here is the problem: It isn't exactly true. While there are small doctors' offices that don't have a staff to process their claims, they don't have that many claims either. Larger offices not only have the staff, but they also have contracts with the insurance companies that allow them to do the processing electronically.

You aren't going to have this relationship with the doctor or insurance company so why would they need you? Even if you do process for many small doctors offices, they would quit using your service once they grew big enough to do it themselves.

You also have to wonder how many doctors offices are going to let you process for them when they don't know you from Adam. Remember that you are new and inexperienced. Most good-sized offices won't use you.

I felt this way for three years and even got a call from a student of mine complimenting me on our materials. He said he processes medical billing for a living and appreciated my reviews. He not only agreed with my writings but even went a step further:

His wife runs a medical billing business out of their home and said that there wasn't anyway that people were going to have the credibility to have doctors cough up their medical records. Remember that medical records are extremely sensitive so you have to have a reputation with at least one doctor to get started.

His wife used to work for a doctor and started taking work home. She didn't learn medical billing from some course at home.

There are better home based businesses than medical billing. Don't waste your time.

Matt Gagnon