The preternaturally observant health care journalist Bruce Japsen summarizes the practice model of direct primary care practice provider Qliance (More Care Up Front For $54 A Month, Bruce Japsen, New York Times, 5/22/12).
We’ve more or less given up trying to pigeonhole all of the variants of convenient, routine, non-emergency health care now on the scene. Retail clinics, urgent care clinics, telephysician visit services, combinations of the last with the first two, concierge services, housecall health care, and on and on – the similarities, the overlaps, the real and potential interrelationships become too numerous to parse.
We do increasingly use a colleague’s deft term for the category – he calls it ‘preliminary care’ – because the name literally embodies the ‘threshhold’ nature of the clinical ministrations the category’s practitioners provide.
Anyway, Bruce notes that if PPACA is revoked, Qliance‘s direct primary care model will be voided, because PPACA explicitly permits direct primary care contracting as a reimbursement model for physicians cleared to provide care to people who are Medicare eligible. Our feeling is this sort of ‘experiment’ would, if even modestly successful, lift all the boats in the preliminary care pond.
Are you listening, free-market zealots? Are you aware, “death panel” harridans? We’re guessing probably not. For shame.
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