Hamawy’s plastic surgery practice features high-interest financing option

On the website for Princeton Plastic Surgeons, the medical practice run by 12th district congressional candidate Adam Hamawy, patients are presented with an alternate option for payment if they can’t afford to pay up front or get their procedure covered by insurance.

“At Princeton Plastic Surgeons, we want you to put yourself first without having to think about your bank account,” the practice’s “Financing” page states. “Our flexible financing options including CareCredit can help you look better and feel better without the added worry of how you’re going to pay for treatment.”

CareCredit, though, comes with some catches. The health care credit card, which is used at nearly 300,000 medical practices around the country, comes with a 32.99% APR; the very high interest rate is waived if the bill is paid in full within a certain amount of time, but if not, patients could be saddled with a sudden influx of medical debt.

Back in 2013, CareCredit was ordered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to pay $34 million to “victims of deceptive credit card enrollment tactics.” In the years since, reporters have continued to find patients who used CareCredit’s deferred-interest financing to pay for emergency medical procedures not covered by their insurance and found themselves deep in debt.

Hamawy told the New Jersey Globe that he “[tries] to run a very ethical practice” at Princeton Plastic Surgeons, and that he advises patients getting elective procedures to hold off if they’re unable to pay.

“The issue really isn’t with the straight elective procedures,” Hamawy said. “It’s for the patients who actually have a medically necessary procedure, and they’ve gone to their insurance company, and their insurance company has denied them. What do you do for somebody like that?”

“For those patients, this is unfortunately, in our current system, the only thing they have available to be able to proceed,” he added.

Asked whether he knew of any patients who had gone into substantial medical debt because of CareCredit, Hamawy said he didn’t think so.

Princeton Plastic Surgeons does indeed perform some procedures – such as breast reduction, facial reconstruction, and eyelid surgery – that serve serious medical purposes and are in many cases covered by insurance. The bulk of the practice, however, appears to be geared towards purely cosmetic procedures: “[We] offer with some of the most natural-looking enhancements for face, breasts, and body – never overdone,” the homepage of the practice’s website states.

That kind of cosmetic surgery is not covered by insurance and can be expensive. For instance, rhinoplasties cost an average of between $10,000 and $12,000, per Hamawy’s website; a $10,000 rhinoplasty with fixed monthly payments of $250 under CareCredit would take nearly 9 years to pay off, and patients would pay a total of $26,250.

Physicians who work with CareCredit receive no commissions; in fact, a merchant processing fee, sometimes between 2% and 6%, is deducted from the doctor’s fee. But the medical practice gets paid within two business days, giving them business they might otherwise have had to turn away. (Physicians could extend credit to their own patients at lower rates instead, but that would mean the medical practice takes on the financial risk instead of CareCredit.)

The CareCredit issue dovetails with a broader campaign-trail focus for Hamawy: health care affordability. Hamawy supports Medicare for All, which would do away with the private insurance system entirely and replace it with a government-run system, and also said he’d support an effort by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to rein in CareCredit and other medical credit cards with deferred-interest policies.

Hamawy himself, of course, has a financial stake in the current health care system; his personal financial disclosure lists his ownership stake in Princeton Plastic Surgeons as being between $250,000 and $500,000. But Hamawy said his own up-front view of the medical system is what convinced him that policies like Medicare for All are needed.

“The reality is that no one should be going into debt by any means to cover medical care, and this is the convoluted system we currently have with health care costs,” he said. “It’s why I’m running. It’s another reason we need Medicare for All, because for-profit health care is just flawed.”