Our country has treated healthcare as an unlimited, inexpensive resource. We’ve paid little attention over the past 70 years to how much healthcare waste occurs and how much healthcare actually costs us. To make matters worse third-party payer systems such as Medicare and private insurance, largely hide the actual cost of care from the average consumer. As a result we consume healthcare as if it’s an endless supply and give little attention to the actual cost of what we’re buying. The truth is that healthcare is a very limited and expensive resource. As deductibles, premium contributions, and copays rise; it’s not only the employer on the hook for rising healthcare costs, but employees are too.
Unfortunately, the cost of healthcare has risen to the point where neither the employee nor the employer can afford it. We have a healthcare system everyone needs but nobody can afford. It’s in everyone’s best interest to reduce unnecessary healthcare resource utilization. We need a system to give the right care, to the right people, at the right time and place, for the right cost. We need a trusted steward of these expensive healthcare resources.
- Who can we trust to guide us to the necessary care that we need?
- Who can we trust with this great responsibility?
Insurance companies and the government have tried limiting access to resources by implementing care management and referral authorization programs that seem like they’re just an arbitrary approach and meant to block care to access.
Advanced, high-value direct primary care offers the most trusted solution to steward healthcare resources. In the context of a trusted relationship with a highly skilled primary care doctor, the direct primary care doctor has more time to spend focusing on each patient so he or she is able to manage more of the care themselves and engage with the patient in shared decision making regarding the necessary care. Up to 80% of all care that is given by the primary care doctors in the environment and when tests or visits with specialists are needed care is directed to the highest value provider in the community. This saves the patient time and money.
Studies show that having a direct primary care doctors is the first point of contact to steward care, reduces necessary emergency room visits, specialist visits, hospitalizations, high cost diagnostic tests, and medications. These are the main cost drivers of healthcare responsible for only 20% of the services that we need throughout the year but accounting for 80% of the healthcare costs.
Direct primary care is the steward of care our society needs to reduce the over consumption of unnecessary healthcare resources and make healthcare more accessible, exceptional, and affordable for all of us.
