In either case, two components that could be separated: a service plan (preventative care) and catastrophic coverage.

I understand what would happen for routine check-ups and serious accidents.

How would such a model handle predictable-but-expensive medical needs, like hip replacements for the elderly and monthly prescriptions for HIV and cancer patients?

I think it's the exact inverse of what you describe. The article describes something like a subscription model for the oil changes that also satisfies the legal requirement for health insurance under 26 U.S.C. § 5000A. The enormous liability and collision part of auto insurance in this analogy is not covered by the plan described in the article.

On one hand, it seems like a great idea for those whose employers don't provide subsidized insurance coverage. If it's truly affordable, it should allow more people to get routine care. Especially for women, who generally need more routine doctor visits than men. OTOH the things that bankrupt people are hospitalizations and real insurance plans are generally there to help mitigate that.

Models where a provider network gets $X a year to handle a chronic condition patient are one of the few bright spots in recent health care policies.

Ten years back we may be looking at high deductable plans as a disaster -- if you have the money to fill an HSA they are great, but for most people in the U.S. an HDCP means that diabetics will not take metformin or insulin but instead they will get their feet amputated at much greater cost.

One clear example is asthma. Steroid inhalers can often enable an asthma patient to breathe freely and avoid hospital admissions for about $200 a month. That looks like a crazy high price, but a hospital admission is going to cost $8000 or more. In the fee-for-service model the hospital profits from amputations, asthma exacerbations, etc. In a flat fee model they make a profit from practing good medicine.

It depends on what your purpose is. It is at least debatable that one of the major problems with our current system rarely addressed by anyone on any side is that it conflates a health care plan with a health insurance plan. The two things may with some justification be the same thing inside of your head, but in monetary terms, they have radically different statistical distributions of monetary payouts required, one being a fairly reliable steady drip of relatively small amounts of funds, one being a highly irregular payout of large amounts of funds. Only the latter is something that "insurance" is a solution to; if you're getting a steady drip of low-payout events the only thing insurance can do for you is add a middleman and raise net prices as a result. (Some individuals may win and some may lose, but it has to come out net more expensive for the system.) Trying to bind the two together into one thing may be part of, though probably not the entire, problem.

Edit. I more meant that almost all insurance is hoghbdeductible insurance these days and it's extremely expensive for what you get.

If you could buy catastrophic insurance with a plan like this then That would be awesome.