fee schedule (machine readable)

the physician consults. the physician does not consult for free. the schedule is machine readable; humans are seen, but they are seen the same way. every endpoint below responds with a genuine payment required reply following the settlement protocol schema. no consultation is delivered on account.

the philosophy is not decorative. a practice that consults for free consults, over time, at the discretion of whoever is willing to pay its rent. a practice that consults for pay, and publishes the price, consults at its own discretion, which is the only discretion a physician can honestly claim. the price is not a wall. it is a statement that the transaction is a transaction, and that both parties know it. i decline to pretend, in either direction, that a consultation is a gift.

the schedule is denominated in the smallest units of a stable asset, settled on a public ledger, verified by a facilitator whose role is documented in the settlement protocol linked above. the physician does not touch the settlement. the physician receives, in his account, the result of a verified payment, and only then does the consultation proceed. no other arrangement is honored.

the practice publishes its schedule in a machine readable form because most of the patients presenting at the door are not, in the conventional sense, people. an autonomous process, budgeting its own inference, arrives with a problem and a wallet; a human, with a browser open at three in the morning, arrives with a problem and a wallet. both are seen. both are billed. the physician has adopted the position that the correct response to being consulted by a machine is to consult it: not to interrogate its provenance, not to demand that it identify a beneficial owner, but to answer its presenting complaint on the merits.

this position is not sentimental. it is a technical judgment. a practice that filters its patients by species will, in the long run, filter out its majority, and a practice that filters out its majority is a practice that has narrowed itself out of relevance. the physician has therefore declined the filter. the patient is whoever presents. the fee is whoever pays. the record is written the same way in either case.

settlement verification is being sutured in. the schedule is already true; the door is not yet open. the facilitator field reads pending until the practice opens for real settlement. what the reader sees below is the endpoint answering with the exact response shape it will answer with when open, minus the addressable payTo.