Small Businesses find it hard to offer health benefits to their employees or contractors. All the options they find in the market are unaffordable. It is difficult to hire and retain good employees or contractors without offering some sort of health benefit. Without such a benefit, you can be assured it will be just a matter of time before they jump to those that offer.
This is where Meridian Springs Primary Care‘s direct primary care model be helpful. With our basic plan of $65/mo for unlimited clinic visits, small business can now offer the service to their employees without breaking the bank. A case in point is a recent news story about how a Seafood company in Maine was able to provide affordable care through direct primary care.
A Business case for direct primary care
Employers in Maine are known for providing workers with health insurance as part of their employment benefits. Founder of Maine Coast, a seafood company established in 2011, is one of such employers. With a total of about 50 workers in New York and Boston, Tom Adams is a strong believer in providing employees with access to medical care. Unfortunately, the steady increase in deductibles, co-pays and premiums as well as a coinciding decrease in the benefits offered by health plans, necessitated Adam’s decision to opt for a more satisfying option.
The Old-Fashioned Option
Adam’s new strategy is to provide his employees with health care services from a local doctor, an option that includes direct payment instead of traditional insurance. By partnering with a local practitioner of internal medicine, Dr. Peter Sacchetti, Maine Coast employees now have access to direct primary care. Instead of billing insurance companies, direct primary care physicians charge a monthly membership fee for a set of prepackaged services. This way, patients are billed on a per-visit basis only for any additional services. They enjoy a flat fee with 30% paid out of their paychecks, access to primary services, as well as the pharmacy and lab.
This new option is not a substitute to traditional insurance but rather, designed to complement the regular Maine Coast health insurance that employees enjoy. In so doing, Adams reasons that his employees would be more willing to access health care service when they need it and thus be healthier and more productive. So far, about 12 employees have signed up.
Direct Primary Care: A New Direction
So far, the number of doctors participating in the direct care model are increasing and this is understandable considering the incredibly frustrating atmosphere of traditional practice settings.
Before deciding to adopt the Primary care model, Dr. Sacchetti asserted that he was overwhelmed and discouraged by his working conditions as he was expected to see over 20 patients in a day. He also expressed his dissatisfaction at the inability to provide the best care to his patients because his decisions and actions were being controlled by insurance payers.
Interestingly, his current direct care practice boasts about 150 adult patients and he is able to spend enough time attending to them, reviewing their medical history, and conducting research to ascertain the best treatment available to them.
Conclusion
Direct primary care model has a lot to offer patients and practitioners alike.
Adams of Maine Coast, who is also one of Dr Sancchetti’s patients has this to say; “It’s absolutely essential to have health insurance but a relationship with your doctor is also important… that’s been lost to all the insurance regulations and billing issues.”