VIP Medical Care. Great Perks But No Panacea

Want faster care, longer visits, and a doctor who actually has time to think about your case?  Host, Andy Keeler, digs into concierge medicine and direct primary care with Dr. Vicki Rentel, a retired primary care physician.   Dr. Rentel speaks candidly about what these models do well, where they fall short, and how they reshape incentives for both patients and clinicians. No fluff—just practical insights on cost, access, and real‑world tradeoffs.

We break down the differences between concierge and DPC: who bills insurance, how memberships are priced, what’s included, and where extra fees can pop up.  We also tackle the uncomfortable truth about speed: a quick referral or immediate test is not always better. Dr. Rentel shares examples of overtreatment and how the pressure to please paying members can skew decisions.  Plus, she explains which questions to ask to keep your medical care evidence‑based and safe.

Prevention and wellness - like many things - come back to basics: habits, environment, DNA, and consistency.  Yes, medical memberships can add accountability, but health outcomes still hinge on long-standing factors like sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress, and tobacco use. The bottom line is simple; the best predictor of your results is the clinician and the quality of their team, not the label on the practice door.

If you’re considering a switch or just want to get more from your current care, this conversation gives you a clear framework: what to expect, what to avoid, and how to choose wisely.    Follow the show, share it with a friend who’s debating health care, and leave us a quick review with your biggest question.  We just might feature it next time!

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Transcript

From House Calls To Concierge Care

SPEAKER_05 0:05

What is concierge medical care and is it right for you? Growing up, I still remember my dad's black leather medical bag, complete with a stethoscope, thermometer, scale, tongue depressors, and various other medical devices that you would take on house calls. Oh, have times changed. Fast forward 50 years, and you may wait days to see your primary care physician. Experience long wait times in the waiting room, all for about 15 minutes with the highly educated. Enter concierge medical care. Is this a medical breakthrough or an imperfect solution with potential for failure? To help us understand the emerging business of concierge medicine is Dr. Vicky Rentel, retired primary care physician. Welcome, Dr. Rentel.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Why, thank you for having me, Andy.

SPEAKER_05 0:52

So I heard about this concept a few years ago from a client that is an equine surgeon and his wife. They explained that they like having a physician on call that could call in prescriptions to their pharmacy, diagnose issues, and order specific tests. Now I'm getting questions from clients about this concept, wanting to know if it's right for them. Vicky, can you lay the groundwork here and help us understand how concierge medicine works from a physician's perspective?

Access, Panels, And Admin Burden

SPEAKER_02 1:17

Absolutely, Andy, and be happy to talk about that. Primary care is an issue that is near and dear to my heart. Obviously, I spent decades practicing it. I should state my bona fides up front. I always practiced in a traditional fee for service environment. So that typically means you have, you know, 1300 to 1900 patients. Some physicians have a little more, some have a little less. Depends on there are quite a few variables that go into that. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of patience to squeeze in in the course of a day. It's a lot of messages, it's a lot of everything. And it's seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And it's frankly kind of bone crushing after a while. Concierge medicine and direct primary care practices, which are interesting little beasts. Directly direct primary care or DPC.

SPEAKER_04 2:11

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 2:12

Interesting little beast. Um have been kind of experiments that have become solutions to some degree to the issues that both physicians face and patients face. Gotcha. It increases access on both sides. Physicians have the ability to see fewer people, spend more time with them, theoretically. And also patients have more access to physicians and office staff both.

SPEAKER_05 2:45

Okay. If somebody wanted to go DPC direct primary care, is that what that stands for?

SPEAKER_03 2:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 2:51

Direct primary care or concierge. So concierge in theory would be like one doctor that a a client or patient works with, whereas the DPC is more like a practice of doctors that offer the same services. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Sort of.

SPEAKER_05 3:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

There may be a concierge practice that's m more than one physician. Okay. Um there may be very large concierge practices and DPC practices out there. Okay. Generally, I think they tend to be smaller. A few physicians, you are paying if you're the patient, you're paying for access, I think, to your physician. So it tends to be smaller, although many concierge practices tend to use in a kind of service organization, via MDVIP as an example, where they help you with some of the administrative challenges of running a practice. Um, insurance contracting, billing, adjudicating claims, helping with audits, um, that kind of stuff that physicians are not very good at.

SPEAKER_05 3:55

Is concierge medicine a good value?

Fees, Insurance, And Netflix Analogy

SPEAKER_02 3:57

I don't have an answer for that. It depends on the individual. Every physician's office should have somebody on call 24 hours a day. So I'm not sure about what this is. Now, you know, is every physician willing to phone in antibiotics for you after hours? Maybe not, but maybe that's not actually good for you. In other words, you know, that's an issue. So the answer is it may be, it may well be for your client that it is the right answer. But I think it's important to keep in mind that just because you're paying extra doesn't mean necessarily that you're getting better care or the care that you need. So I'm not saying that as a way of um talking down about these practices. What I'm saying is you should rest assured that if you have a good physician, you should do whatever you can to stay in that physician's practice because that's what makes the difference. Not how much you're paying, not whether you can reach them at two o'clock in the morning, etc.

SPEAKER_05 4:49

Aaron Powell Thinking through how somebody either engages a concierge practice or DPC versus primary care. So under a primary care model, you in theory have health insurance, and that specific primary care office either does work with your insurance company or does not, but assume that they do. You go in and you have an office visit, you might have co-pays and all that kind of stuff. But more or less the insurance company is covering that. Um, but there's also the administrative burden to that office to file the claims paid. Yes. All that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 5:25

And all of the regulatory and documentation requirements, yes.

SPEAKER_05 5:28

Which is a headache.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

Yes.

What Memberships Include And Don’t

SPEAKER_05 5:30

Under the other model, the patient pr pays a subscription fee for more or less the right to have access to that primary care physician or concierge doctor. Um and, you know, in thinking about this, it's kind of like um Netflix. If you think back to Blockbuster Video, Blockbuster Video had to rely on you to decide you wanted to watch a movie, and maybe you watched four movies a year. So they extracted$9.99 or whatever it was for you to rent that movie four times per year. That model didn't work, they went out of business. Um Netflix comes along and says, you know what? You have to pay us$9.99 a month, and we will send you these videos, and now it's streaming, whatever. But the point is that they get that recurring income stream. When you have a field of medicine that is already short on providers, terribly short, yes. There's a shortage of doctors.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Oh, terribly, yes.

SPEAKER_05 6:37

And the pipeline appears to be limited.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 6:40

So the future isn't necessarily super bright for the medical profession.

SPEAKER_04 6:46

No.

SPEAKER_05 6:46

But people need to get care from somewhere. Exactly. On the one hand, the doctor's office has more patients than they know what to do with, because let's say that that office has 10,000 patients amongst all the doctors. It's not like every one of those patients is coming in every single day. They're getting revenue only when they do come in, but the frequency of those people coming in is enough to sustain the office. Could we get to a point where even the primary care doctors, primary care offices, say, you have a subscription fee or you have a monthly fee to be part of our practice?

SPEAKER_02 7:30

There's a lot to unpack in that, first of all. Um and second of all, in answer to that most recent question, there would be a lot of things that would have to change. In concierge practices, they still bill insurance typically. There's a lot of overlap between these, and these are not official designations. They kind of are dwarf around. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 7:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:51

Um in concierge practices, they typically continue to bill in your insurance company. So they're you're they're not only collecting the subscription fee. The subscription fee or retainer, they're also billing your insurance every time they see you. And many of those practices, DPC practices as well, have um fees if you go over a certain amount of appointments.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Right.

Who DPC Serves And HSA Rules

SPEAKER_02 8:17

You may have X number of encounters a month, a quarter, a year, et cetera. And they may be certain types of encounters you may get an annual wellness appointment plus, you know, three problem-based appointments and two urgent care appointments, et cetera. Gotcha. And they also may charge, they also may include um telephone encounters in that. They may add, you know, if it's a quick question about did you say to take that once or twice a day, that's easy. But if it's more complicated, like my great-grandmother Sue has colon cancer and she's depressed. And I feel like my tongue turned purple last week. And, you know, just which are honestly, I laugh, but it is the kind of email that you get constantly from patients. And so they may bill for those aside from what they're billing through the membership fee and your insurance company. DPC practices also may do the same thing. DPC practices tend to not bill insurance, they do not participate in insurance. So they fulfill a certain niche that's kind of interesting. Um, but for most people who have health insurance, they're looking at probably a regular fee-for-service primary care practice versus a concierge practice now.

SPEAKER_05 9:25

Who would pick a DPC if they're not using insurance? Because I'm thinking a wealthier person in theory could pay out of pocket.

SPEAKER_02 9:33

People who have not enough insurance. So you have a catastrophic plan with perhaps a very high HSA. Um, this might be appealing to somebody who is um, let's say 62 and they're gonna get Medicare in three years, and they have to pick up insurance and they're a little bit shocked at how much it costs. So instead of getting, you know, a plan that has every belly whistled, they buy a more catastrophic plan and they contract with the DPC physician and they just have to pay$50 or something for an appointment in addition to a lower fee. It also might appeal to a small employer who wants to offer their patient, their employees, um insurance, but the cost is prohibitively expensive. So they fund an HSA for their patients and contract with the DPC provider. They're hard to find in, there are some in Columbus. They're hard to find in in urban areas with lots of insurance penetration. They tend to be in smaller towns and and rural areas. It is interesting that the big beautiful bill of 2025 includes a provision to allow DPC fees up to$150, you can use your HSA to pay for them. You can't do that for concierge practices. So if you can self-fund your health care, which is a dicey proposition, you know, one car accident can empty your wallet by millions. Um, that's one thing. But if you're kind of thrifty and you need something and you can find a good DPC practice, it's an interesting little beast. Interestingly, DPC physicians rate their job satisfaction as the most high among all of these particular groups because they're not, they don't have the hassle. And I cannot hassle is a euphemism for for this the stress that insurance documentation and reporting requirements.

The Hidden Work Of Primary Care

SPEAKER_05 11:31

Spoken from someone that was on the front lines. You said you said seven days a week, 365 days a year. Yes. One would think, well, gosh, my doctor's up office is only open Monday through Thursday, nine to five, and half a day on Friday. What's she talking about?

SPEAKER_02 11:50

Oh, well, in information has always been, this isn't this isn't a new thing because of electronic health records, but information for a doctor comes in 24 hours a day, every day of the year. I mean, I could I have when I was working, I never took a vacation where I wasn't looking at my charts every day, or I had to have somebody look at my charts. You are getting information from hospitals and labs and phone calls and refill requests, and it is just relentless and it never stops. And it requires so much work to go through those things carefully. I don't know if you've ever looked at, you know, my chart in Epic after you see a doctor or go to the emergency room. There's you read the note and you're like, what is all this crap anymore? I don't setting aside the medical lingo, why did they ask me about my religious affiliation? And, you know, like all of these questions, they're all required by CMS and you know, the entities that accredit offices and hospitals. There's so much documentation in there that really isn't relevant to the particular reason that you were being seen that day, but physicians still have to supply all of that information. And sifting through all of that, you know, before I ever saw a patient in the morning or in the afternoon, I would sit down for hours with charts and just go through what had come in since I saw you last time. I would be reading radiology reports, lab reports, um, letters from specialists, et cetera. And and that stuff is relentless. It comes in constantly. That's just part of the job.

SPEAKER_05 13:23

You don't have time during a normal day because you're seeing patients every 10, 15 minutes.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

Exactly. And I really can't, what I would do is, you know, the electronic health record, I would still spread out a bunch of papers in front of me, uh, kind of old school, um, printing the things that were high yield for me. I, if I'm talking to you, you know, there's a whole lot of information I'm getting from you nonverbally and and I'm listening to what you're telling me, and I'm going through the to-do list that I had in my head before I ever saw you. And and I can't also do a really careful read of a radiology report. And just looking at the impression and plan of the report is never enough. You have to go dig through the report. Did the radiologist forget to put in the impression that there was a mass that needed a follow-up CT in six months? Or you were in the hospital for appendicitis and they treated your appendicitis, but nobody forgot, nobody remembered on your discharge summary to put that you also had an ovarian cyst, or, you know, kind of a complicated thing that needs follow-up. Or you had abnormal LFTs, and I need to make sure that that I made sure that your liver functions went back to normal. I I mean every physician. You can't do it. You can't pay close attention to something while you're paying close attention to something else. And every patient in the exam rooms deserves your undivided attention, even if that means it's life or death.

SPEAKER_05 14:41

It can be.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

It can be.

SPEAKER_05 14:42

And so, you know, at at the start, you said, you know, based on this workload, these things are kind of a relief for the physicians and they're convenient for the patient.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

Yes.

Faster Referrals And Overtreatment Risks

SPEAKER_05 14:56

Um one thing that that um I know a lot of patients get frustrated with is once, let's say if they they are seeing a primary care physician and they're they have to be referred to a specialist for a shoulder or something else, sometimes those specialists are booked out six months, eight months. And from what I've been told by clients that use concierge uh medical services, somehow they're able to get to the front of the line or a phone call is made and that test gets set more rapidly. What is your take on that? Would you say that that is a potential positive to concierge medicine over normal primary care?

SPEAKER_02 15:42

There are a couple of things about that. Number one, the problem with healthcare in the U.S. is not the responsibility of any individual patient. But, you know, the reality is when you when that specialist sees you before somebody else, is that fair or not? Was the other person that's not your job as a patient to figure that out, but it might happen to you.

SPEAKER_05 16:03

Somebody's getting bumped.

SPEAKER_02 16:04

If right, if somebody's concierge is played golf with the specialist. So um, it is the responsibility of the specialist, of course, to triage appropriately. Um, it's not the patient's responsibility at all. On a more practical basis, when patients tell me I got into see so-and-so, the best back surgeon, for example, I think to myself, sometimes, I wouldn't let that guy operate on my cat. Like, why did that guy have time to get you in? That soon. And and again, the the the the devil's in the details. Um, why did that specialist have time to see you? That's my cynical response. Um, and third of all, I was asking my colleagues about their experience with this and patients who go to concierge or DPC practices and come back. And I was asking an orthopedist friend of mine what his experience was, and he kind of laughed and said, you know, I have a I have a real life example from this week. I got a call about seeing a patient, a guy who had had uh like a weekend warrior accident 10 days before he actually saw the specialist. He called his concierge physician who got him in. That concierge physician had him be A, non-weight bearing, B, put him in what's called an AFO boot or you know those big heavy things that you strap onto your leg to immobilize the ankle. Got an X-ray, which didn't show anything, typically doesn't unless there's a fracture, because these are mostly soft tissue injuries, which are not radioopaque. The patient complained three days later that they were still having pain and swelling. So the concierge physician ordered an MRI, which the patient got. The MRI showed, you know, appropriate soft tissue injury for a mild nichel's brain, called the specialist and got them in for an urgent appointment. Had to be seen within 24 hours. The orthopedist says what this guy needed was compression, ibuprofen, and early mobilization. He didn't need to be immobilized. What happened was all of this attention actually impeded recovery. It's gonna make it harder to recover what should have been a pretty easy thing to recover from. Now, again, this is not every example. This is not, I you can come up with a thousand examples of situations right. But the reality is that every single medical intervention carries risk. And in this instance, this guy was done no favors by his early attention from a specialist. I raise that just as a potential because, you know, taking an antibiotic too soon, you might not need and exposes you to risks. Immobilizing a joint, you know, treating a rash that might go away on its own. There are all kinds of things. And I can't come up with all kinds of examples where harm was done to people because we intervened and didn't give something time.

Preventive Care, Behavior, And Reality

SPEAKER_05 19:04

In that specific example, it would seem like it was really the concierge physician that led the patient astray. And one would argue that's really on them because the whole idea is that person should have more time with fewer patients. So they should be more thorough, not less.

SPEAKER_02 19:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 19:28

Would you agree?

SPEAKER_02 19:30

I would. And you know, that is sort of an issue. I don't mean this to sound pejorative. I really don't. There is a financial incentive for a physician who is being directly paid by a physician, I'm sorry, by a patient, to make you happy. You know, is this patient who is, you know, works out to their paying me$10 a day or$6 a day or, you know,$100 a day, whatever the fee works out to be. Um are they, am I making decisions based on the evidence, or am I making decisions based on retaining the patient? And on a I I'm sure every physician would deny that that's the case, but you know, it's it's there. Um, and it's just something to go into with your eyes wide open if you're considering being a concierge patient.

SPEAKER_05 20:20

So I mentioned at the outset my dad was a physician, and one of his philosophies was preventative medicine, trying to keep people out of the doctor's office. Um would you think that having a concierge in your back pocket would improve that?

SPEAKER_02 20:37

Aaron Powell Possibly. I'm gonna say it depends. Um if I had a dime, you know, for every time I told a patient to exercise and they didn't, I could have retired, you know, about a year after I started practicing. But is having a better relationship with a physician where you have more skin in the game that is gonna get you back in two months because they have time to to look review your exercise log, will that change your behavior? Maybe. In that instance, absolutely, that puts you ahead of the game. Um, you know, wellness is one of those issues that it's a bugaboo for me. I could I'm not I'm against it. I'm not.

SPEAKER_05 21:12

You're against wellness.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

I'm against wellness. No, but here's the thing we talk so much about preventive things. Everybody really knows at heart what you should be doing. You should be exercising every day, managing your stress, getting enough uh sleep, eating, you know, something mostly like a Mediterranean diet. And if you need somebody to if you need to pay somebody to tell you to do that, absolutely. But the reality is it's your genetics, your lifestyle.

SPEAKER_05 21:37

What I'm hearing from you is so as I've as I've matured and my father passed on, I don't live with mom anymore. Um she's passed on too, but um now I find myself not calling the doctor and just kind of letting things run their course. Whereas I would have been more inclined to say, hey, I've got, you know, a drippy nose. Can you call in a prescription?

SPEAKER_02 22:04

Right.

SPEAKER_05 22:04

Now I'm kind of letting it go. Yeah. And maybe that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 22:08

Yeah, most things get better on their own. A dirty little secret of medicine is most things will get better if you just give it time and supportive care and hot tea.

SPEAKER_05 22:16

So my wife was on to something when she never went to the doctor.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, JJ rocks. So yeah.

SPEAKER_05 22:25

I mean, never is maybe not a good thing, especially for a woman. You should probably go to the doctor. There are some things. Yes. The point is, her parents were like, we're not taking you to the doctor.

Equity, Shortages, And Systemic Costs

SPEAKER_02 22:36

Well, I mean, ask any physician, you know, how they treat their families. And, you know, there's a lot of it'll be fine. It'll get better. Go back to bed. It's uh-huh. Yeah, I get it. Some ibuprofen. No. No, you don't need a doctor's appointment.

SPEAKER_05 22:48

You know, and so maybe having that concierge doctor's phone number in your back pocket isn't necessarily all that necessary.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

It is neither good nor bad. It is it just you have to be gimlet-eyed about it. And if the physician says, Oh, I'll do this for you, you have to ask them why. Even if it's what you want, you need to be sure it's what you need, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 23:14

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

Your discretionary income to the degree that it affects how the social determinants of health bump up against you. You know, do you have a a warm house, a roof over your head? Are you worried about where you're gonna sleep at night, etc.? Um, do you smoke? That's a probably the biggest single modifying have you ever smoked? Um, those things the physician really has no control over. And that's probably 95% of wellness. Now, you see your concierge physician, can they move the ball down the field to make that 95% that you walked in with 96% or 97%? Okay, then that might be worth it for you. But the physician has so little to do with wellness in general and preventative. Now, in terms of, you know, making sure that you get appropriate screens with pediatricians, making sure that you your kids get their immunizations, you know, um, heading things off at the past like that, seeing somebody with a pneumonia, this isn't wellness, but once you're already sick, seeing somebody with pneumonia early on in their illness so that you can keep them out of the hospital. That's a much better use of society's money and your money, actually. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_05 24:22

I I do want to talk about kind of the future of healthcare and the negative implications of this, because you pointed out it pulls medical professionals away from the masses. I don't wanna I want to be careful not to offend people. No, no, no, I'm not sure. But it's the truth.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

It's you know, anything that I might say negatively about concierge or DPC practices is not about why people choose to see them. I completely understand why they choose to see them. Or about the physicians who choose to convert their traditional fee-for-service model to a uh concierge practice and go from having 1,600 people to worry about at night to having 600 people to worry about at night. I completely understand that. That sounds like a dream. Um what it really is is an indictment of healthcare in the United States, which is terrible. It's a you know, SHIT show, really. And and until you've bumped up against this, you have no idea. You know, physicians have a great idea of what a terrible situation it is.

SPEAKER_05 25:27

But patients Which is why you retired?

SPEAKER_02 25:30

Um well to some degree, yes. I mean, I had always planned to retire as a well it doesn't everybody, but you retired at what age? 29.

SPEAKER_05 25:41

Smartass.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

Fifty eight, fifty-nine, fifty-nine in that vicinity.

SPEAKER_05 25:46

Yeah. My dad retired at sixty-five. Um perhaps in nineteen eighty, eighty-five, the medical profession was different. Maybe a little, but the the pain is real. It's pretty clear.

What Actually Predicts Good Outcomes

SPEAKER_02 26:03

Absolutely. And and I'll tell you, Andy, it makes me furious, honestly, because most physicians, you know, physicians go to an awful lot of trouble and expense to become physicians. When when the their friends that they went to college with who became accountants are at home sleeping at night, um, you're, you know, picking maggots literally out of people's feet in the emergency room. You know, the the and you do it because it's really interesting. The I mean, I can't think of a better job than being a physician in terms of the science, especially right now. It's just exploding. What we can do for diseases. Well, give you, for instance, when I was in medical school, um, one of the lectures that we had from a neurologist about multiple sclerosis is the first thing you need to do is tell your family, tell your couple to get divorced because they're gonna have to do a Medicaid spend down. And if the husband or the wife wants to keep the house where they can live with the kids, they're gonna have to plan for this in advance because the end is inevitable. And now I had patients who had MS who were kayaking and riding bikes and doing fantastic things. The things that we can do with cancer, it's amazing. And the ability to take care of people and be involved in your small way, sometimes big way, at a time in their lives when they are vulnerable or where you can head a problem off at the past, it is the most rewarding job that I can think of. It is for me, once my day started, especially seeing patients, it was like magic. Now, you could ask people I work with if I acted like it was magic every minute. I did not, but I loved seeing patients. I loved it. I still love it. If there were a way to do it, you know, when I wanted to and not when I had to, I would still be doing it.

SPEAKER_05 27:42

And not have all the other bad correct.

SPEAKER_02 27:45

It's the in it's the everything else. And you know, I mean, there's some things like being on call. That's just part of the job. You have to be on call. And there are only so many calls at three o'clock in the morning from people who don't know how they can lose weight that you can take without wanting to punch a hole in the wall. Um, that that was hard for me. I'm not somebody who sleeps well anyway. So I mean, there were little things like that that piled up after 30 years of being on call. I just wasn't interested in it anymore. But the patient care part of it, it's hard for me to think of a physician that I know, and I know a lot, who don't still really love taking care of people and all of the things that you could do for them. It's just that everything else has made it so hard.

SPEAKER_05 28:25

Folks leaving the primary care model to practice concierge medicine or the DPC model are essentially removing health care providers from the masses and providing it to the wealthy.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

Aaron Powell Yeah, from an equity point of view, it certainly is problematic. And then even on a practical scale, when you remove health care, I'm not making this up. This isn't my opinion. This is pretty, this has been demonstrated over and over again. When you deny access to healthcare to large groups of people, they everybody gets sick. They present sicker, they consume more resources, they may be under under resourced, they may not have money or insurance to pay for their care, which makes healthcare more expensive for everybody. And when sicker people present, they use up the resources of the physicians taking care of them, the MRI machines, the CT, the medications. We've dealt with so many medication uh shortage issues in the US over the last five to ten years. Um, so this actually does affect everybody, whether you have insurance or not. It makes if you have a concierge physician or not, it's gonna make it harder to get your MRI. Like all of these things from an there's the you know social justice issue. That's one thing. But setting that aside is a practical matter. It's you want everybody to be healthy. Absolutely. And you can prove over and over again, you know, healthy people work, they pay their taxes. I mean, it helps everybody. Kids grow up to be productive members of society. You know, um, every physician can tell you a horror story about somebody who had with didn't have any insurance or had, you know, something that they couldn't afford. It was good if they were hit by a bus, but not useful for anything else, um, about how this just became a catastrophe that didn't need to happen. I mean, medical bankruptcies in the United States are why? Why do we have medical bankruptcies in the United States? Um even if you are not interested in the equity issue, the reality is it affects everybody. But I think one important thing to note, you know, if you want to see a concierge physician and you can find one that is good, fine. If you have reasons to see a DPC physician that's good, that's fine. The evidence suggests it really doesn't matter what setting you see a good physician and they could see you in their garage and you could barter for chickens if that's, you know, if that physician was was somebody that you trusted, that you could be frank with, that that provider could be frank with you, that they could see you over time and get to know who you are, and you could get to know who they are and how they're, you know, how quickly they respond. And, you know, do I need to call an hour before or a day before? Like that kind of thing. If they have a decent office staff, not just decent, I mean an office staff makes or breaks a practice regardless of the setting, you're gonna interact a lot more with office than you will with the physician. Um, the evidence shows that with regard to quality metrics like how well your blood pressure is controlled, how well your your A1C is controlled if you're a diabetic, those things are excellent with an excellent physician. It doesn't matter where you see that physician. It doesn't, the cost really isn't the issue. It's who the physician is and how their office works. That makes sense.

Closing And Listener Resources

SPEAKER_05 31:39

Dr. Reynolds, thanks for getting us on the path to health. I want my clients around long enough to spend all their money. And as always, we thank our listeners. I'm Andy Keeler, and this is Financial Opportunities Uncovered, brought to you by Keeler and Adler Family Wealth. If you have questions on anything you heard in this episode or have an idea for a future episode, connect with us on LinkedIn or email me at Andy.keeler at kanwealth.com.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

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