Greg:
Hey, this is Greg from Big Bay Mornings on 99.7 NOW, and I am back with my friend, board certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Bae.
Dr. Bae:
Hey Greg, how you doing?
Greg:
I am amazing Dr. Bae. Hey, I wanted to talk to you about this, you are very transparent with your pricing. You have a pricing tool right here on the website that people can find out how much something cost. Not everybody can pay for everything right upfront I mean, you’re not going to sit here and tell people, “Yeah I can do this for next to nothing.” And I don’t want my surgeon saying that by the way.
Dr. Bae:
Right. Cheap plastic surgery isn’t good and good plastic surgery isn’t cheap.
Greg:
No. So tell me some options that people have, maybe I can’t roll out five, six, seven, $10,000 just right off the bat but I want to get a procedure done that cost that.
Dr. Bae:
Yeah. So it’s a tough question because we don’t want people overextending themselves but there are definitely ways of financing these operations through different services. We don’t actually do any in… people ask all the time, do we do in-house financing? We don’t do in-house financing meaning that we won’t do your operation for nothing upfront and then you pay us back over time. We don’t do that but we do use some finance… You’d be surprised how many people ask that-
Greg:
Well, and by the way, I don’t do that for the radio station either. I don’t say, “I’ll work for a couple of months and you pay me later.” So I get that. I don’t do that either Dr. Bae.
Dr. Bae:
So that’s what I’m hoping is once the utility company says, “Oh, we’ll just give you the electricity [crosstalk 00:01:35] and you can pay us next year.” That’s when I’ll start doing. But for now what we do is that we use some third-party financing companies. We use CareCredit which a lot of people use, not just for cosmetic procedures but if you have a high deductible health plan and you got to pay out of pocket for medically necessary services, people use CareCredit for that, they use it for dental work. So we use CareCredit, We use another company called Alphaeon Credit, there’s Prosper Healthcare Lending. There’s several of them out there and they do things different ways as far as how they pay but the idea is that we get paid upfront for the service from that company and then the patient pays them back.
Dr. Bae:
So like CareCredit for example, they will pay the pers… pay the CareCredit back. The consumer will pay CareCredit back monthly for a certain period of time. And the thing people need to keep in mind there are options. There are some options like you can do six months no interest where CareCredit pays us everything and then if you pay CareCredit back within that six month period, you have to pay them the full amount but no interest that’s pretty awesome. But just to be sure-
Greg:
That is awesome, that’s like cash, yeah.
Dr. Bae:
It’s like cash but just be sure that you’re going to be able to pay it back within that six months because if not, then they are going to start to add interest and the interest is like 26%. It’s very high. Now-
Greg:
Oh, I see you do financial advice to Dr. Bay. So you are a financial advisor and… Yeah I mean, [crosstalk 00:02:55] don’t understand the interest rates and stuff like that so you have to do your research.
Dr. Bae:
Right. And that you got to keep in mind, how do these companies make money? They don’t make money by paying… people paying them back interest free in six months, they make money by people not being able to pay them back in six months interest free and then they have to pay a 7th and 8th month and the 9th month with that 20% interest rate. So of course, whatever advice I’m providing make sure you clear with an accountant first or your tax advisor. But the other thing to keep in mind is like, okay, well still you’re thinking, “Okay. You know what? I can’t afford it six months. I can’t pay it all off in six months so I don’t want us to be stuck paying some usury interest rate for that after those six months.” So the other option you might think is like, “I’ll pay it off over five years or I’ll pay it off over six years.”
Dr. Bae:
And they do have plans like that but keep in mind, those interest rates are pretty high too. Maybe they’re not as high as 26%, but they are may be like 14% or something like that. So they do get kind of high if you’re not going to pay them off within a year or two. So just keep that in mind, be safe, read the fine print. The fine print is there. They’re not trying to hide it from you. They have actually, I think by law had to made the fine print bigger. It can’t be as fine has to be bigger and easier to read. The other thing the state of California has done is that we can’t sign you up for CareCredit. That’d would be the way it could be done in the past and we could be done honestly where we would sign the patient up for CareCredit.
Dr. Bae:
They would give us their information and we would physically sign them up online. Now we no longer can do that. They have to physically log in and sign up for themselves because obviously some doctors may be or some institutions were signing people up without their knowledge so that’s why you can’t do that anymore. We never did that of course but anyway, read the print, know what you’re getting yourself into. And a lot of people you’d be surprised I mean, even if your credit score is not awesome, people are still getting approved by these different companies and they’re getting their procedure and hopefully paying back the company to keep the company whole so they don’t turn them over to collections.
Greg:
All right. And what about crypto coin? Do you take crypto coin? That’s a big thing-
Dr. Bae:
We do actually. You got to-
Greg:
What?
Dr. Bae:
Yeah you got to stay up with all the time. So yeah, we take Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dozer Coin. We [crosstalk 00:05:08]. I don’t know that we can take XRP right now. I think that’s tied up in litigation the SEC or whatever but yeah, we do take crypto coin if people are interested in paying that way. The trick is to get paid by that crypto coin and then cash it out immediately because the price fluctuates [crosstalk 00:05:28]. Yeah somebody can pay you when it’s $10,000 and then when you’re cashing in it’s $8,000, you just lost $2,000 on the operation but-
Greg:
There you go. [crosstalk 00:05:36] got to work out your finances on your end too.
Dr. Bae:
Exactly. That is true.
Greg:
All right. Well thanks Dr. Bay. And if you want pricing, it’s right here on the website, everything is transparent. You can book appointments, you can call to ask questions. You can email to ask questions or probably the easiest way is to reach out on social media.
Dr. Bae:
Yeah, you can reach us on TiTok, Snapchat, Instagram @realdrbae R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E. You’re a great spokesperson Greg, I might pay you to do this.
Greg:
Oh, you should in crypto. I’ll take Bitcoin.
Dr. Bae:
Fair enough.
Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.
