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I’m going to show you a number, and once you see it, you will not be able to unsee it. Ready? The telehealth company you work for is keeping roughly $98,000 of your work every single year. Not guessing. Not a “gurus on Instagram” estimate. I run a billing company, which means I stare at these exact numbers on a spreadsheet for a living. So let’s do the math, nobody at your “amazing flexible RD opportunity” is rushing to do business with you.
The per-hour spread is where it starts
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In a state like Illinois, the average reimbursement for the visits you are already doing runs about $132 an hour. You get paid $50. That means your employer pockets $82 of every clinical hour you work. That is 62 cents of every dollar that your license, your training, your liability, and your actual brain just generated. They are not splitting it with you. They are keeping the majority of it and handing you back the smaller slice with a wellness-week email attached.
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Now stretch it across a year
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Per hour is easy to shrug off, so let’s annualize it, because that’s where it stops being annoying and starts being infuriating. At about 25 patient-hours a week, your work generates roughly $158,400 in reimbursements over a year. You take home $60,000. They keep about $98,400. Read that twice. Ninety-eight grand of work you personally performed, sitting in someone else’s bank account, every year you stay.
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“But they bring me the patients.”
Yes. They do. That is the one real thing they do, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. So let’s be honest: you are paying that company $98,000 a year for a calendar-filling service. That’s it. That’s the product you’re buying. And here’s the part that should make you sit up: filling your own calendar is a learnable skill. It is not a $98,000-a-year skill. Nobody’s marketing is that good.
The honest caveat, because I won’t lie to you
That $132 is gross, not take-home. On your own, you’ve got billing, software, taxes, and the occasional no-show, so you will not pocket every dollar of the spread. Anyone who tells you you’ll keep all of it is selling you something. But even after all real costs are subtracted, you are not working for fifty bucks an hour anymore. Not close. The thing standing between you and that spread isn’t talent, and it isn’t luck. It’s credentialing, and credentialing isn’t hard. It’s just tedious.
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What to actually do about it
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Those same insurance panels that pay your telehealth employer can pay you directly. You just have to get credentialed and learn to bill. I teach the entire process inside my Reimbursement membership, with me in your corner the whole way. And if you’d rather skip the portals and paperwork entirely, my agency does the credentialing for you.Â
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Either way, the version of you that keeps her own $98,000 is closer than you think. Pick your path, links are below, and go before your next shift talks you out of it.
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