Cosmetic Surgery Financing: Your Options

For Dr Di Saia's Patients

For those interested in financing their surgery with Dr Di Saia, you have choices. We have a financing program for the office to which we can help you apply to get your procedure financed. You can click the link to apply before your consultation if you would like. If you'd like to know your procedure amount, please call to make an appointment for a consultation and we can go from there. The exact work and price for a particular operation does vary somewhat between patients. There are also some internet-based credit card options explained below to which anyone may apply. The number of credit offers in has decreased in the recent economy, so some of these may change or be discontinued.

The History Of Cosmetic Surgery Financing

To make things easier on everyone concerned, some surgeons started developing global fees for commonly performed cosmetic operations in the eighties. What's a global fee?

A Global fee is an all inclusive fee paid for all (or most ) everything needed in a particular procedure. Things to ask about relative to such fees are:

• Is post-operative care (visits) included? For how long?
• Are post-operative medications included?

At this point most people were paying cash or using standard credit for their procedures.

> Enter The Cosmetic Surgery Finance Company

In the nineties, specialty plastic surgery financing companies entered the market of cosmetic surgery financing. Today's companies operate very similarly. They advertise themselves as your friend. They are going to help you get the surgery you want. Similarly, they present themselves to surgeons as the service to get their patients funded. Everybody does not win here.

Prospective clients generally apply for these loans at the doctor's office and the loan is offered for work done in that office only. Many of these companies offer credit to people who would have otherwise not qualified. As you might expect there is always some kind of catch here.

The most common of these involves the design of these loans. The physician is set-up as the original lender and the financing company buys the loan at a discount...often 15-25%. So say you need $5000 in liposuction financing. The doctor's office is paid $3750-4250. You are required however to pay off the entire $5000 at a high interest rate. So the financing company does well, the doctor's office takes a hit and the patient pays off a loan on more than was paid for the surgery at a high rate.

So what have many doctor's offices starting doing in response to this loss of revenue? A couple of things:

• Stop using all or the majority of these cosmetic surgery financing companies
• Increase fees or require cash deposits to reduce the lost revenue in the cases in which these cosmetic surgery financing companies are involved. Note that this makes the patient's financial burden even greater!

We have seen interest rates on these specialty cosmetic surgery loans as high as 29.99%! So just like in any other transaction involving a line of credit

We spend time filtering through offers from these companies, but cannot guarantee the nature of the loans they make with you. We have excluded some of the trickier programs though. We want the best for our patients.