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Comment by alphanumeric0 | Hacker News Reader

I would like to ditch insurance and find a doctor who would allow me to pay a monthly subscription fee, much like a gym membership, for preventative care.

Isn't the primary purpose of insurance for exceptional and accidental situations? If that's true, then why am I using it for predictable monthly expenses?

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What you are looking for is called Direct Primary Care. It exists in nearly every major city in the US at this point, and is very affordable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGZaRnC1wNg to hear one doctor talk about how this works out in practice.

Google Direct Primary Care + your city/state to see what's available. It's SERIOUSLY better than the mainstream option. I've been doing it for nearly a decade now, and would never go back. Combine it with a cost sharing plan (NOT insurance) such as https://www.libertyhealthshare.org/3-program-options to achieve superior care at lower cost.

Wow that's great, thanks for the tip.

So what do you do when you get cancer and run up $1 million in bills? That's what insurance is for. Not sure if your monthly fee is going to work for you like that.

I think they meant they would still have insurance, just not for preventive care.

Preventative care means less risk of catastrophic care. Its cheaper for insurance to encourage you towards preventative care than pay for the catastrophic care.

This is available for rich folks. This is "boutique medicine". Possibly the way of the future - to coexist with social medicine, of course.

How rich do you have to be? Why is it not available for the rest of us?

It's not unavailable to the non-rich, just unaffordable.

Your information is outdated. It was unafforadable fifteen years ago . . . in the last five to ten, it has become very, very affordable and has exploded in popularity to the point that it's available all over the country. Here's one example: https://atlas.md/wichita/our-fees/

    Children 0-19 years old, $10/month with at least one parent membership
    Adults 20-44 years old, $50/month
    Adults 45-64 years old, $75/month
    Adults 65+ years old, $100/month
    Employer groups with 5+ employees, $50/mo/adult

That particular practice offers wholesale-priced labs and meds as part of the price (which is common), which can save you more than the entire cost of the membership if you're dealing with something chronic. https://atlas.md/wichita/benefits/

I don't have a dog in this fight — I was merely pointing out that no one is stopping non-rich people from buying anything. It's just that people with lots of money can afford more than people with less money, in medicine as in anything.

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