Bridging the Elective Care Insurance Gap with In-House Financing

The cost of elective procedures remains a barrier to life-changing care, even for financially stable patients with high-value private insurance. 

High out-of-pocket costs and insurance exclusions push patients toward financing, yet third-party lenders often fail to bridge this gap.

Rigid underwriting.

Limited healthcare context.

High interest rates.

These all result in rejections for patients who could reasonably repay treatment over time.

According to a poll by the University of Michigan, 46% of patients forgo elective procedures like fertility care, hearing aids, vision correction, dental procedures, and cosmetic surgery because of cost. With elective care reimbursements in the U.S. estimated at roughly $200B annually, the amount revenue left on the table is substantial.

In-house financing transforms how patients receive elective care.

It expands access to treatment by offering flexible payment options at the point of care. Clinics maintain control over medical decisions and patient experience without being a revenue donor to third-party lenders.

Why Sticker Shock Happens in Elective Care

Whether it’s vision, hearing, or a fertility treatment, elective procedures can be life-changing for families and individuals in terms of mental health, employment, quality of life, and long-term health.

Nonetheless, these and many other treatments are systematically excluded from insurance, forming a financial barrier that is overwhelming for most. Very few households can afford to hand over $5k-30k+ in a single payment. 

The drop-off happens after the specialist recommends the procedure and the patient learns how much it’s going to cost out of pocket. It’s a universal friction point: whether it’s elective surgery or life-changing dental work, the clinical journey stops cold at the checkout counter. In that high-stakes moment, the medical relationship shifts into a banking transaction.

Most patients are able and willing to pay for the procedure over time, but they are forced to either give up on getting treatment or try to get a loan from a third-party lender.

As a clinic, you’ve done the work, you’ve educated, qualified, and supported the patient’s decision to move forward with care.

And then you are forced to outsource the outcome to a finance provider whose generic credit metrics often overrule your patient-specific repayment assessment. When patients get turned away or priced out by a finance provider, clinics’ capacity is unfilled, revenue is lost, and people don’t receive the care they need.

Why Third-Party Lenders Reject Viable Patients

A patient may be clinically ideal and financially stable, yet fail a consumer credit screening or get offered punitive terms. This happens because consumer lending operations are not designed to incorporate healthcare context into underwriting decisions. Even if they could, lenders are not focused on the outcomes your practice needs.

The traditional consumer lending system simply isn’t built for healthcare. When third-party lenders apply consumer credit frameworks to elective care, they erase most of the profit margin while still rejecting a bulk of viable patients.

As a result, self-employed professionals, high-income customers who don’t use much credit, and people undergoing major life transitions are disproportionately denied care. Because lenders operate at scale, they are unable to support exceptions, contextual judgment, or care-specific repayment options. By design, applicants at the margins of these models are denied, even if they would have no difficulty repaying treatment over time.

Why Offer Tailored Payment Plans for Procedures In-House

As a healthcare provider, your history with a patient is a more reliable predictor of repayment than a standard consumer credit report. You’re uniquely positioned to know how they handled prior treatments, how responsive, and how committed to your practice they are. 

Financing should bridge the gap for patients while supporting the organization’s growth. But managed by a third-party lender, it erodes profit margins with processing fees becoming a hidden tax that can cost a practice hundreds of thousands a year. 

For reference, third-party lender fees typically range from 5.9% to 15.9%. For a practice generating $10M/year, this can amount to $1M or more lost annually.

Once financing is managed in-house, your practice regains control over the entire patient lifecycle including their personal data, experience, and long-term relationship.

When you offer payment plans in-house, you:

• Safeguard patients’ personal and financial information
• Strengthen ties between patients and your practice
• Flatten seasonal revenue curves with predictable installment income
• Improve ROI of every financed procedure by eliminating lender fees
• Increase conversion by controlling approvals and terms

How to Move Financing In-House

Most practices historically relied on middlemen for financing because offering flexible payment options in-house required lending expertise, manual workflows, and additional administrative overhead. This barrier no longer exists.

Modern embedded lending platforms enable providers to integrate financing directly into their operations. End-to-end platforms like TurnKey Lender handle borrower evaluation according to provider’s criteria, automate onboarding, origination, servicing, collections, patient communications, and deliver real-time reporting fully integrated with your clinical and billing workflows. 

When financing is embedded directly into the care process, access improves, conversion rates rise, revenue becomes more predictable, and you help more of your patients. You no longer need manual underwriting, fragmented tools, or dedicated finance teams. Financing becomes a built-in capability and a readily available option at the point of care, not an outsourced obstacle to overcome.