The article is called My doctor wants me to pay a yearly subscription fee—and that’s increasingly common and does a so-so job in explaining DPC. Unfortunately, it conflates DPC and Concierge Medicine. So what is the difference? For the life of me, I don’t know. Why? Well, obviously if you still bill insurance then you are not DPC. The next difference between DPC and Concierge is cost and there is no true line of delineation. Sometimes things cost much more if you live in NYC so I understand while monthly fees would be higher. But this is a story for another day. Now back to the article. At least it gets some information out there about DPC and that is good news for us. Sort of. It does mention Phil Eskew’s site: “There are 1,450 direct primary care practices in the U.S., up by a little over 200 in the last year, according to data from industry tracker Direct Primary Care Frontier“. Let’s hope patients check that out.
Then it mentions some horsh$t information:
“The primary care physician may ‘cherry-pick,’ inviting the most healthy to join their concierge practice. Some studies have shown that concierge practices include fewer patients with diabetes or hypertension,” wrote two doctors and professors from the University of Arizona College of Medicine at Tucson on the rising phenomenon in the American Journal of Medicine.
And
Critics say that the growth in direct primary care and concierge health effectively creates a two-tiered health system. Since both concierge and direct primary care practices see fewer patients, it means there are even fewer doctors available for Americans who can’t afford such elite care.
Both of these myths I dispelled in my first book.
So, there you go. We take the good and the bad but I hope some organizations (DPC Alliance, for example) reply to Fast Company and correct their misinformation.