Market-Based Membership Approach to Healthcare At the Same Monthly Cost As a Cell Phone Plan

From the Qliance website: "Traditionally, over 40¢ of every $1 you spend on health care goes toward insurance billing and overhead (see chart above). This means your clinician must work harder and faster, seeing more patients each day just to make ends meet. As a patient, you experience longer wait times, shorter appointments and higher costs.

Qliance is like a health club membership, but for health care. Your membership gives you unrestricted access to your Qliance clinician and services for one monthly fee. Instead of dealing with costly overhead, we reinvest that 40¢ in our clinics, electronic medical records and in patient services. You experience shorter wait times, longer appointments and lower costs."

From the WSJ: "Qliance operates three clinics in the Seattle area that offer primary care treatment to patients who pay a monthly membership fee ranging between $44 and $84, depending on their age. The company accepts no form of health insurance for its services. Qliance intends to use its financing to expand in Washington State, with plans to open clinics beyond the state as early as next year.

The company argues that its care covers roughly 90% of the medical issues that people see doctors for, from checkups to minor fractures to vaccinations, as well as ongoing care for chronic illnesses like hypertension. Qliance members typically pay other companies for insurance to cover emergency procedures and serious illnesses, such as cancer.

Qliance is betting it can profit by wringing many of the administrative costs out of health, especially the overhead that comes with haggling with insurance companies and billing patients. The company’s clinics are open seven days a week and says its doctors are able to spend more time with patients – at least a half-hour for routine appointments and an hour for physicals – than most physicians who take insurance do."

MP: This is another great example of an innovative, market-based approach to health care (similar to the 1,171 retail health clinics currently operating in 40 states, but with expanded services) that continue to develop, despite the government takeover of the health care system. By eliminating insurance and billing overhead, Qliance gets the monthly cost of health care down to about the same cost of a monthly cell phone plan. Unfortunately, Obamacare will send costs in exactly the opposite direction - higher and higher with an increase in bureaucracy, overhead and paperwork.