It's not only patients who are fed up with America's over-priced and inefficient health care system. Tired of paperwork and delayed payments, a group of Seattle MDs have come up with another way to practice medicine.
They have devised a medical practice open to anyone who wants to join, with unlimited service, and flat rates.
This sounded almost too good to be true.
Many, many kudos to diarists like nyceve and slinkerwink and others for lobbying hard to help bring decent health care to all Americans. Their work has inspired many on this site, myself included, to make the phone calls and write the emails and do the visits to help promote an effective national health care plan.
Until a good plan has been passed, a group of Seattle doctors have come up with an ingenious way to offer a full-service, relatively affordable practice for their patients. Services are flat-rate with no limit on services.
One canard floated by the anti-public option set has been that unrestricted access to doctors would lead to abuse of services.
Not so say the Seattle doctors.
Qliance patients get unrestricted round-the-clock primary care access and 30-minute appointments.
"Why would a doctor not want to see sick people? That doesn't make sense, unless you're an insurance company," Bliss said.
He rejected the idea that unrestricted access causes overuse, calling that "nonsense promoted by insurance companies .... There's nobody I've ever met who gets their pleasure by seeing doctors."
The tiered pricing of the plan would determine the level of service received, making basic coverage affordable for many more people than the cost of conventional insurance.
Qliance customers pay $99 to join, then a flat monthly rate of $39 to $119, depending on age and level of service. Patients can quit without notice and no one is rejected for pre-existing conditions.
Patients must go to outside brokers and qualify medically to buy catastrophic care. One broker said a 30-year-old could expect to pay $133 per month for such care, and a 60-year-old nearly $400, plus substantial deductibles.
The plan obviously isn't a cure-all for our ailing health care system and those of us who have medical needs we can't afford to address. But it is a far better plan than many of us who are insured have access to, and the clinic, even though a start-up, is expected to turn a profit soon.
Co-founder Norm Wu said per-patient revenue is triple that of insurance-based clinics. He said many costs are fixed so the firm, now losing money, will turn to profit as business grows.
Even from a business perspective, the insurance model benefits only the insurers. If there was a better understanding of this core deficiency in our health care system, I think we would have more citizen-lobbyists banging on the doors of congess demanding a solid public option plan.
Co-founder Wu stated that some "50 noninsurance clinics operate in 18 U.S. states, based on different business models". May their number increase until there's a solid national plan we can all join if we want to.