May 26, 2014
According to Uwe E. Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton, about half a century ago, organized medicine and the hospital industry in this country struck a deal with Congress.
In retrospect, it was as audacious as it was incredible: Congress was asked to surrender to these industries the keys to the United States Treasury.
May 13, 2014
In Washington, Amitabh Chandra stood before a roomful of economists, policy makers and health care experts earlier this month. As director of Health Policy Research at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he closed a presentation about the slowdown in health care spending over the last decade by citing an article in The New York Times.
“Changes in the way doctors and hospitals are paid — how much and by whom — have begun to curb the steady rise of health care costs in the New York region,” the article declared. “Costs are still going up faster than overall inflation, but the annual rate of increase is the lowest in 21 years.”
June 28, 2013
The AAFP released an official statement on DPC. It’s going to bat for practices like ours. We especially like their word choice in their support for both doctors’ AND patients’ choice to embark on direct care. In our opinion, the free market principle of choice is what behooves our healthcare system, offering competitive options that eliminate red tape and incentivize innovation (like we’re doing with atlas.md). Couple that with increased public awareness of unfair, exorbitant costs associated with greedy pill makers and we might continue to see falling healthcare costs in the upcoming years.
“The AAFP supports the physician and patient choice to, respectively, provide and receive health care in any ethical health care delivery system mode, including the DPC practice setting,” says the policy. It notes that the model is structured to “emphasize and prioritize” the physician/patient relationship to improve health outcomes and lower costs
As Gandhi once said, Be the change you want to see. We are that change in primary care. But we’re human, too. We prefer receiving support, instead of resistance.
View the AAFP’s policy on Direct Primary Care here.
June 28, 2013
Wait, is this the same Association of American Family Practitioners who’s been used by dated critics to turn direct care into another Red Scare? They once warned, according to the LA Times, that direct primary care could lead to further shortage of doctors down the line. We, of course, knew better and said, No, unhappy doctors who refuse to practice altogether should be the real concern. We’ve been charging ahead, day-by-day, doing what we believe in, and the media is paying attention. Meanwhile, the AFFP maintained a strictly neutral opinion, to our awareness. But now it appears they’ve leapt off the fence and into our court, with a new article highlighting three direct care practices, including Atlas MD.