There is an interesting article from the New York Times you should read. It’s called Corporate Giants Buy Up Primary Care Practices at Rapid Pace. I was especially tweaked by this paragraph:

The appeal is simple: Despite their lowly status, primary care doctors oversee vast numbers of patients, who bring business and profits to a hospital system, a health insurer or a pharmacy outfit eyeing expansion.

Lowly status? How does that make you feel?

I don’t love it.

Some more nuggets with my thoughts in parentheses:

• But now, nearly seven in 10 of all doctors are either employed by a hospital or a corporation, according to a recent analysis from the Physicians Advocacy Institute. (How about listing the ones thriving who are doing DPC?)
• Insurers say their purchase of medical practices is a step toward what is called value-based care, with the insurer and doctor paid a flat fee to care for an individual patient. The fixed payment acts as a financial incentive to keep patients healthy, provide more access to early care and reduce hospital admissions and expensive visits to specialists. (This is why we mock those who love value-based care. It’s a meaningless term that insurers love. You are a pawn in their game when you do lectures on it. Hear that, AAFP?)
• Doctors also chafe at oversight that does not benefit patients. “They are trying to run it like a business, but it’s not a business,” said Dr. Beth Kozak, an internal medicine doctor in Grand Rapids, Mich. (Sorry, Beth, it is still a business. You can work for free if you want. When you understand this then you realize 3rd parties are stealing all the profit. Do DPC when you come to grips with what businesses do.)
• “We’re dealing with incredible levels of burnout within the profession,” said Dr. Max Cohen, who practices near Portland, Ore. Since the pandemic, his low-income patients have become much sicker, he said, with the level of illness “through the roof.” (Max, Max, Max. I would tell you to do DPC but something tells me you will have a thousand excuses why you think it will be abandoning your patients.)

There is a war going on. You can read the rest of the article but docs are selling out to 3rd parties because they are ready to quit. Insurers are laughing all the way to the bank as they ride the backs of their lowly horses….er….I mean primary care docs.

Don’t take this crap!

Consider Direct Primary Care! And someone tell Beth and Max about it because they really need help.