Let’s give a shout-out to Dr. Lauren Mitchell at Honest Family Medicine who was mentioned in a local NPR story recently. And also to Dr. Jennifer Allen at New Freedom Family Medicine was gave us this:
Direct primary care physicians can be better advocates for their patients because they’re not being directly paid by insurance companies, Allen said on Tuesday’s St. Louis on the Air. They’re still affiliated with hospital systems and can refer patients to specialists.
“When your practice is owned by a third party, then they control how you take care of people and how many people you have to see,” Allen said. “In direct primary care, what we found is, by taking the insurance out of the equation, we’re able to provide the care that our patients need on their terms.”
Allen serves as an advisory board member for the Direct Primary Care Alliance, a resource for doctors interested in opening their own clinics. In the past five years, she’s seen the number of direct primary care physicians jump from 400 to nearly 3,000.
She said she often can get prescriptions and lab fees much cheaper for her patients than providers who are handcuffed by insurance.
“Something has to change,” Allen said. “We can’t continue to allow health care costs to spiral out of control and ignore huge populations of people who aren’t getting care.”
We want to thank you two for spreading the word about DPC and the DPC Alliance!