Forbes Loves DPC
In a new Forbes article, With Direct Primary Care, Healthcare Doesn’t Have To Be Expensive, the author, Katherine Restrepo, gushes about Direct Primary Care:
This simple and effective strategy is known as direct primary care (DPC). It brings back personalized medicine, and it’s a win not just for doctors and patients, but also for the state.
It is nice to be loved. Want more?
Imagine not having to spend 40 percent of practice revenue on personnel responsible for submitting claims to insurance companies. Opting out of insurance contracts allows solo direct care practices to break even on just four patients per day rather than 32 in today’s typical practice setting. DPC heightens providers’ professional satisfaction because they can escape the corporate environment of the ever-consolidating health care industry and instead hold fast to their autonomy. Calling their own shots under this business model allows for them to actually practice the art of medicine by scheduling longer appointment times with patients if necessary and even committing to house calls.
Ok, another:
Health policy wonks like to throw around the “value-based health care” buzzword a lot.
DPC is the epitome of value-based medicine.
Please spread the word. It’s not that I need the business as I am getting close to filling up my practice. Spread the word so that other doctors can unshackle themselves from corporate medicine and be the doctors they always wanted to be.
I’m hoping to be gone in 5 years and won’t be looking back. I’ll shed tears for folks still stuck or unable to leave the practice of primary care.
I love it. It worries me. All of the “reforms” in the last thirty years healthcare have been geared towards extracting money from the “Healthcare Industry.” DPC and the Healthcare Industry are conceptually unrelated. I fear it is only a matter of time until DPC is milked with “operations taxes” to wreck its foundation – giving direct primary care, period.
I fear it will be like the black-market economies in countries with regulated markets. Too much black-market activity, and the corruption and inefficiency of the regulated markets becomes exposed. Too much crack-down on the black market, and you don’t get flowers for your honey for Valentine’s Day, or any other asset which the official market just cannot provide.
I really hope that DPC can prevail quietly in the world of the moochers and looters. I worry.
Yes, it’s possible that reasonable alternatives that buck the “traditional” delivery models could be smacked down with more government regulations. That would be a damn shame.