A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
1–10 of 121 posts
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#2I think there is a selection effect. It mentioned that losing some of it's large corporate customers was a big issue. When you sign up a bunch of employees that get this service through their employer, chances are good that most of the people will underutilize the service - thus you have a good profit. If you lose that, and now a lot of your customers have subscribed individually, there is a good chance that they will overutilize the service - after all they paid good money for a reason. Thus your profits will decline.
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#3I think there is a selection effect. It mentioned that losing some of it's large corporate customers was a big issue. When you sign up a bunch of employees that get this service through their employer, chances are good that most of the people will underutilize the service - thus you have a good profit. If you lose that, and now a lot of your customers have subscribed individually, there is a good chance that they wil…
[deleted]
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#4as a patient, Qliance was a phenomenal experience, and easily worth the cost. (I no longer live in the area, but am with a DPC practice where I am now, which is of similar quality.)
I wonder if the problem with losing their big employers was that it changed their patient demographics too sharply and suddenly.
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#5I think there is a selection effect. It mentioned that losing some of it's large corporate customers was a big issue. When you sign up a bunch of employees that get this service through their employer, chances are good that most of the people will underutilize the service - thus you have a good profit. If you lose that, and now a lot of your customers have subscribed individually, there is a good chance that they wil…
I suspect that reason might (often) actually be that they are in less than average health and selecting the correct 'plan' for them.
The insanity is forcing patients to compete for health plan coverage. We'd all be better off with a single payer system and locality based dutch-auctions for figuring out who provides the care.
Also, can I please have Dr. Watson (or similar) take actual inputs and determine if further tests are necessary to confirm or reject a diagnostic result? I still want an actual doctor to make the final check on the results, but I'd rather have an algorithm make the guesswork less dependent on one person knowing -everything- (that's what computers are for).
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#6I think there is a selection effect. It mentioned that losing some of it's large corporate customers was a big issue. When you sign up a bunch of employees that get this service through their employer, chances are good that most of the people will underutilize the service - thus you have a good profit. If you lose that, and now a lot of your customers have subscribed individually, there is a good chance that they wil…
What you're describing looks a lot like adverse selection.
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#7If they are talking about "direct primary care", then there are still plenty to choose from: http://www.dpcfrontier.com/mapper/
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#8Kaiser offers "flat fee primary care", and they do OK. But they have experience at running that kind of business.
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#9A former travelling companion (on a long distance train trip) moved from Head of R&D for an advertising agency into working in the medical technology industry. After six months or so, he returned to his former job of head of R&D at the advertising agency. When quizzed by the staff at the advertising agency as to why he came back to such a corrupt industry. His comment was that advertising were little children in terms of corruption compared to the medical technology industry.
I had a long discussion with him about what he had seen. He made the statement that every company that he saw would increase their prices for any product that was being sold into health care by at least a factor of 10 over what they would sell the same product for to non-health care areas.
I, myself, have had other conversations with various people (in both drug companies and medical institutions) and it has been common for comments to be made as to the vast difference between drug production costs and the final retail sale prices (even taking into consideration all the development costs, I have seen some of these figures and they are, well ....).
Health care is as exorbitantly priced as legal consultations and representation and the value received is in many ways far less than what you would receive by going to Macca's.
Re: A Pioneer in 'Flat-Fee Primary Care' Had to Close Its Clinics
#10Anyone have insights on how Go Forward Health (https://goforward.com/) is doing? I love their concept, to the extent I almost want to work there. However, I wonder if such services would suffer from an adverse selection problem -- their current cost of $149/mo seems almost free these days -- how do they manage high-volume users?