It starts with the title:

Many Doctors are Switching to Concierge Medicine, Exacerbating Physician Shortages

Wow, thanks for the love. A few things go off the track right away. Direct Primary Care is not Concierge Medicine. They finally get around to that halfway through the article. I explain it here.

Also, somehow it is our fault that there is a physician shortage? It’s not that the employed job sucks and doctors are burning and/or killing themselves? It’s not that they make primary care the crappiest medical job with the least pay? It’s not that there are not enough residency slots? (By the way, you will hear this criticism a lot. I went over how to answer this in my book).

No, it is your greed doing this.

Ugh.

Then there is this same old attack on us:

While there are variations on the model that come at a lower monthly cost (and cut insurance out of the picture altogether), skeptics question why physicians and patients feel the need to circumvent the traditional U.S. health care model at all

BECAUSE THE PRESENT MODEL SUCKS!

But it gets better.

Russell Phillips, director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care, says that while concierge medicine has gone a long way in helping physicians manage their workload, earn more money and provide better access, it is not a perfect system. “That reduction in the number of patients—often from nearly 2,000 to 500 to 600—means that many patients are left without primary care physicians at a time of increasing shortages in primary care clinicians,” he says.

Great job, Russell. I just love when an Ivory Tower person pontificates how DPC is hurting the system. It must be important for Harvard Medical School to see such a reduction in primary care doctors except for the fact that:

Harvard is one of nine medical schools in the United States without a Department of Family Medicine!

Yes, they have no family medicine residency. But you are a bad person for doing DPC.

Feel free to read the rest and comment here because you cannot comment on the actual piece. It has some other good points but mostly it is a hit job. They do not interview any DPC doctor. They do not talk to the DPC Alliance. Those are the things that would make it a fair and objective article.

Sorry, I am a little pissy this morning.