For more than a year, I haven't received a single dollar from any insurance company. I work for my patients. A few hundred doctors across the country are working the same way, some in blue-collar towns. Routine care should be affordable to the middle class, and as more doctors and more patients form relationships that exclude insurance companies, prices will drop.
Insurance doesn't make routine care affordable; it makes it more expensive by adding a middleman.
I know that some patients can afford nothing, so two afternoons a month I volunteer at a clinic that cares for indigent patients, which I could not have done with the huge patient volume I was seeing a few years ago.
When doctors break free from the shackles of insurance companies, they can practice medicine the way they always hoped they could. And they can get back to the customer service model in which the paramount incentive is providing the best care.
LA Times
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