There’s a few doctors in my city who charge a $50 a month fee for a 30-39 year old and you can call and see them whenever. Insurance doesn’t cover it at all. I’d also imagine if you tried to really abuse the relationship and show up constantly for no reason the doctor might fire you. I feel like it’d encourage a relationship of respect both ways.
I interviewed a couple of them and one talked to me for an hour about health and diet and exercise, just a friendly chat to see if I wanted to use him. He said he was getting ready to retire from medicine after years of ER work when his doctor friend encouraged him to try direct primary care. It was so different than the regular medical system, cutting out all the middle men.
My parents have a concierge medicine relationship with their physician. It's fantastic. He is a complete professional who cares deeply about all of his patients (he works nights and weekends, does research outside of business hours, works around insurance and exploits every legal loophole possible to help them) but holy crap is it expensive. They are paying for their normal insurance plus this service ($3000 annually). This is what it's come to in the US---to be able to have a semblance of a relationship with your physician you need to pay a premium on top of the gouging that your "insurance" already charges you.
Note: My parents are not* rich, they scrape by on social security and my dads part time work fixing sprinkler systems.
"I’d also imagine if you tried to really abuse the relationship and show up constantly for no reason the doctor might fire you." My worry with something like this would be the doctor firing me as a patient as soon as I became unprofitable for any reason. Sure if the doctor is good you'll be fine, but how can you really know until you need to know?
I have a friend here in U.S. who runs their practice like this. They don't make any money at all at this kind of price. They should be charing each patient more like USD 200 per month.
I interviewed a couple of them and one talked to me for an hour about health and diet and exercise, just a friendly chat to see if I wanted to use him. He said he was getting ready to retire from medicine after years of ER work when his doctor friend encouraged him to try direct primary care. It was so different than the regular medical system, cutting out all the middle men.