Paying Cash, Saving Money: Cash-Pay Healthcare Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe paying cash for healthcare in the United States, by people who were uninsured, between jobs, on high-deductible plans or simply curious why the numbers made no sense. A freelance designer's knee scan came down from a $2,900 quote to $350. A rancher in Montana drove two hours each way to save five hundred dollars. A nurse discovered she had never known her own lab price, and a pharmacist quietly offered to run a prescription two ways. The writers include a carpenter, a dry cleaner, a mover with a hurt back, a band director whose father died at fifty-nine, a line cook with a swollen ankle and a retired surveyor whose dentures were made at a dental school. Their care ranges widely: colonoscopy, stitches, cataracts, hearing aids, a home sleep test, a birth centre package, a vasectomy, hernia and gallbladder surgery at flat-fee centres, cash-pay therapy and psychiatry, a doctor who handed out his cell number, a twenty-five-dollar clinic by a bus station, and bills itemised and argued down. The book is honest about limits: a man still pays off an emergency bill after chest pain, a birth centre plan ended in a hospital transfer, insulin suddenly cost $412, and a few found their insurance would have been cheaper.

Who it's for

For anyone facing a scan, operation or bill without good coverage, people on high-deductible plans, and those who have never thought to ask what care costs before agreeing to it.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 233 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.