We found this article, In an Unprecedented Move, Seven National Primary Care Organizations Launch Joint Vision to Rewire Primary Care Financing, to be ridiculous but obviously we weren’t the only ones.

“Primary care physicians cannot adequately meet the needs of their communities if they remain shackled to payment schemes which reimburse for volume instead of value,” said John Brady, MD, Chair of the American Board of Family Medicine. “Many current regulatory demands unnecessarily distract clinicians from patient care. Coming out of the pandemic, a return to the status quo is not sufficient. The American public deserves better.”

These seven national organizations developed specific recommendations to advance primary care as a public good, shift the model of financing primary care and dismantle the regulatory and financing structures that interfere with optimal individual and population health. The unified vision includes a shift from cost-based attributes of the current model (sick care, organized around episodic, transactional, and fragmented care delivery) to a model grounded in health equity and investment – with attributes based in health and organized around longitudinal, relational, and integrated care delivery.

That’s a lot of big words that will fix nothing.

Dr. Dan Swartz, MD of Forest Direct Primary Care in Forest, Virginia responded to this article in Doximity:

Having recently purchased a direct primary care practice and tasting the freedom, I’m convinced that this is the way to change primary care. If more primary care docs would join the DPC ranks, we wouldn’t need these organizations to attempt to change. They have a level of optimism (or delusion) well beyond me to believe that the other specialties and established systems will change in a way that decreases their revenue and shifts it to primary care! DPC empowers patients to pay for primary care they value (usually the cost of hair+nails or a cell phone or cable bill for the month!); if they don’t value it, they leave. No middleman. Funny, few leave…..

You go, Dr. Swartz!! DPC rocks.

(Editor’s Note: Full disclosure. Dr. Swartz purchased his practice from us.:))