Consumers For Health Care Choices: Garrison Bliss, MD, Pioneer in Medical Practice
Dr. Garrison Bliss is a board certified physician with 30 years of practice in primary care. His Seattle Medical Associates was the second practice in America to test a monthly fee “concierge medicine” approach to primary care.
His new company, Qliance, is bringing the same principles to working people, including those who are uninsured. He is a past president and chairman of the Society for Innovative Medical Practice Design, and widely considered the leading voice for patient-financed medicine in the United States.
Each provider only treats 800 patients a year versus 3,000 to 5,000 so who picks up their slack? clearly this is the same as charter schools and is only a stop gap solution for people who pay out of pocket the monthy fee for a carve out of care. At $55 a month for 800 patients they are grossing over $528,000 a year so that is sweet..
They don’t however cover basic preventive care like mamograms and without a gyn on staff how do they treat the most common reason women go to the doc (family practice can handle it but he is an internest) they also don’t treat depression one of the top four reasons for visits to doctors.
Will it help provide affordable basic primary care and make his investors wealthy? Sure sounds like it but will it solve the problem with health care in this country? Not unless you triple the number of family practice docs so that they can all treat only 800 people.
Washington has 2.5 doctors for every 1000 people but there is a shortage of doctors in Eastern Washington because unlike other business doc’s don’t locate where the need is but where they want to live and can make the most money. Of course they can drop Medicare. Afterall why let the sick poor elderly fill up your practice hours when you get get the healthy wealthy to shop at your practice. This is the whole foods model of health care. Most people won’t be able to afford it and it doesn’t solve the problem of access at all.
With his Utah background I am guessing he is a free market advocate all around? Even though there are strong incentives to cut the overhead in health care we don’t “purchase” health care like a TV. Insurance is there to cover us in case of very expensive accidents and it makes sense to use his model for the small stuff, but only if everyone has access.. Otherwise they are just shifting the high cost low income people onto their colleagues.
Oddly enough the VA provides the highest care at the lowest cost because they essentially own their patients for life and have a vested interest in the outcome. Medicare also only has a 3% overhead not the 30% cited in his video. That is only for the private sector blues that need to pay their exec’s a fortune (Aetnea ceo was paid over 2 million last year)
I was a patient at Seattle Medical Associates since it’s inception and am now with Qliance. On my last visit I asked how well things were going with Qliance and who exactly was signing up. I was told people like taxi drivers and self employed people with small business ventures who could not afford horrendous insurance premiums. These are certainly not “the wealthy”.
I’ve been spoiled with the type of service this model is able to offer…and chose to pay regardless of the full medical coverage I have at work. When I listen to my (hospital) work associates talk about waiting a month and a half for appointments and sitting in the waiting room for almost 2 hours my choice to spend this extra money is validated.
If this keeps even a few people out of the emergency rooms it is worth it. I hope you’re not implying that just because the system is broken we should all be bound to live with the misery of the broken system.
Perhaps eventually there will be more physicians when our best and brightest realize there is a way they can actually practice medicine and not just graduate to be insurance company puppets.