… you’ll see a proliferation of new ideas, like the Qliance Medical Group model described in this Bloomberg Businessweek article.
In exchange for monthly fees between $50 and $130, depending on age, Qliance patients can see their doctors as often as they want. “I feel like I have an advocate for my health,” Aldridge says.
Over the past decade, many doctors have established “concierge” practices that offer highly attentive care to ultrawealthy customers who pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month. Qliance founder and internist Garrison Bliss watched as some of his former partners started one of the first concierge practices, known as MD2, in 1996. “I had no interest in a $1,000-a-month practice with 50 patients,” Bliss says. Instead, he adapted the idea for middle-class patients who paid him $65 a month. He eventually had 800 patients, about one-third the number he handled when he accepted insurance. After 10 years of running his own small practice, he opened the first Qliance clinic in Seattle in 2007, which he envisioned as the start of a national network. Now his three clinics have eight doctors and two nurse practitioners. None handles more than 800 patients.
Think you’ll be able to se your doctor as often as you want under full-blown ObamaCare? Want to buy some choice real-estate property dirt cheap?
It’s one more argument against centralized health care decision making and in favor of consumer-driven health care.
