Doctor opens no-insurance practice

By Meg Haskell

BANGOR, Maine - Amid all the sound and fury of the health care debate, one local doctor is taking a quiet step toward simplicity.

Dr. Karen Hover, who has practiced family medicine in the Bangor area since 1992, will open a new office in Bangor next month. For walk-in patients and those with appointments, she will provide a full range of primary care services — treatment of illness and injury, camp physicals, vaccines, annual check-ups, prescriptions and so on. In some ways, it will resemble the care available at other clinics in the area.

But what will set Hover’s medical practice apart from nearly every other practice in the state boils down to this: Payment is required at the time of service.

That means cash. Credit cards are OK, too, and personal checks. Hover won’t take payments from Medicare, MaineCare or private insurance companies, although she will help patients seek reimbursement from their insurers. Billing insurance companies is more than a nuisance, she says — it adds an unacceptable level of bureaucracy and expense to the healing profession she practices.

Full story