answer:When I worked in medical billing we did this quite a bit in order to draw customers. How it works is, we ate the cost of the patient’s deductible if the deductible was low enough so that we still made a significant profit on the visits. According to my ex-CEO, insurances assume you’re not so stupid as to not collect money owed to you, so they don’t tend to make a big hullabaloo about it. I am not sure if he is correct about this, since it makes sense to me that the insurance companies would investigate – they are not required to pay the providers anything for their treatment until the provider collects the deductible and coinsurance/copay. But we never got audited, and every other physical therapy office we knew of also did this, so… My guess is that this is common in industries like my old physical therapy company and roofing companies, where the potential profit in the work is so high that they consider eating the deductible a cost of doing business. It’s both light insurance fraud and a good deal.