Is direct primary care the same as concierge medicine?

You may have heard of a similar model called "concierge medicine". While there are similarities with DPC, the two are different in some fundamental ways. For starters, concierge practices often bill your insurance in addition to a monthly fee (though some don't—which makes them DPC practices!). This means they're still a part of the insurance industry's ridiculously complex reimbursement system, so they have to hire administrators to handle all the paperwork. This gets reflected in your monthly fee; the average concierge practice bills $200-300 per month. By comparison, DPC memberships cost approximately as much as your cell phone bill. Concierge was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. To bring sanity back to primary care, you need to cut insurance out of the picture entirely.

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