Primary Care Can Be Comprehensive and Convenient for $2 a Day
Provided insurance is not involved. All this will go away, however, if Obama Care is fully implemented.
Seattle-based Qliance Medical Management’s three clinics typically charge a patient about $65 a month for unlimited access to the practice’s 12 physicians and nurse practitioners. (Fees vary depending on the level of service and the patient’s age.) Office appointments last up to an hour and clinics have evening and weekend hours, with e-mail and phone access to clinicians as well. Routine preventive care and many in-office procedures are free; patients pay for lab work and other outside services “at or near” cost, and they get discounts on many medications.
Full article on Qliance and monthly membership fees for patients.
Obamacare will stop this type of thing from happening.
You’re right. This will not survive Obama Care.
From the Article:
The average $700 to $800 per patient that Qliance receives annually in membership fees is up to three times more than a doctor in a standard insurance-based practice might make per patient, says Norm Wu, the company’s president and chief executive. “So we can have a third the number of patients and get the same revenue per clinician, but with much less overhead,
and
This idea raises a host of questions, policy experts say, including how direct-pay primary-care practices could charge monthly fees for preventive care services that under the new law are supposed to be provided free.
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The monthly fees is nothing more than a barrier to keep less affluent patients away free up more time for the those more deserving.
If the gentleman mentioned in the article had insurance which he did (and it was stated that half the members at this facility did have insurance) then the preventative benefits should be free as they currently are today under PPACA. So why are they being charged?
This is a new business model I haven’t seen before. It’s like an “all-you-can-eat” health care buffet. Neat idea — I wonder how well it works over the long term?
I’m no fan of ObamaCare and I very much would like these innovative models to succeed.
However, it’s not clear to me from the Kaiser article that these types of plans would be outlawed under ObamaCare. The article notes:
“Washington state’s representatives in Congress and its governor, Christine Gregoire (D), successfully pushed to involve direct-pay practices in the federal health-care overhaul. Under a provision in the new law, insurers selling plans on the state-based insurance exchanges that will open in 2014 will be allowed to ‘provide coverage through a qualified direct primary care medical home plan that meets criteria established by the Secretary.'”
That makes it sound like these could still exist under ObamaCare. Or is there some error in the Kaiser reporting I’m not aware of?
Thanks,
— Paul Hsieh, MD