![]() ![]() In our famously broken US healthcare model, an insurance company is wedged in between you and your doctors, and it has different objectives than you do. How could it be? It’s because of the incentives.įigure 2: The Insurance Model for Health Care Through some sort of magic, the Direct Primary Care model offers much better medical care and much lower prices, at the same time. Oh, and direct email, phone and text message contact with your doctor, prescriptions over phone or video call, and in some cases even house calls depending on the practice and the situation. All covered, with no co-pay and in an environment that feels to me like Presidential-level health care, in striking contrast to some of my past experiences where I felt like an anonymous numbered ticket in a sloshing sea of bureaucratic institutional medicine. Diagnoses, prescriptions, skin conditions, stitches, even fixing a broken bone if you don’t need surgery. Then something magical happened: I learned about the new and vastly improved world of Direct Primary Care physicians.ĭPC is a fairly new trend in the US, but it is also a return to a very old tradition: a direct relationship between you and your doctor, with no insurance company in the way.Īs a customer, you pay for a monthly subscription (somewhere around $100), and in exchange you get unlimited access to super elite, personalized medicine for the vast majority of your medical needs. But was I really willing to be part of that unsatisfying and broken insurance model? ![]() Most people don’t have the luck of perfect health, many have a larger family than I do, and very few people are in a financial position to self-insure for all possible medical bills.Īlso, I found myself wishing I had a doctor that actually knew me, who I could call or visit on short notice if I ever did need help.įinally, I wanted to switch back to having some form of insurance so that I could learn about it and write about it as time goes on. This situation has not been quite ideal, because my life is not a very useful model for everyone to follow. And as luck would have it, I also enjoyed the same good health as always over this time period – probably the best in my life so far because the extra healthy living has been working its magic. In other words, just rolling the dice and going through life with no form of health insurance at all.ĭoubling down on the bikes, barbells and salads, I did my best to eliminate any risk factors that are in my control, while accepting that there are still much less likely but more random factors that are not.Īlmost two years and $10,000 in premium savings later, I have found the experiment to be a success: I have slept well and not worried about the fact that I could be on the hook for a big bill if I did ever need major care. Sure enough, the risks and rewards of the coverage did not justify the premiums, so I decided to try an experiment and simply drop out of the market and insure myself. I needed to answer the question, “Is this insurance really as bad a deal as I think it is?” So I decided to take some action, by doing the math for myself using a spreadsheet. I felt like I was being squeezed from both ends and it was starting to piss me off. I am guessing that you might feel the same way these days – most of us Americans are in the same boat. The premiums were rising even as the quality dropped in the form of an ever-increasing deductible. ![]() Two years ago, I was unsatisfied with my options for health insurance. ![]()
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