Heirloom Family Medicine, a direct primary care practice<\/a> that does not require insurance or full-coverage insurance. Instead, patients pay a monthly membership fee \u2014 ranging from $250 to $600 \u2014 for what Montie describes as concierge-style primary care, including 24\/7 access by phone, text or email, same- or next-day appointments and longer visits.<\/p>\n\u201cIt really just allows me to go much deeper with my patients and really get to know them not only as their medical diagnoses and their medical history, but also about them as people too,\u201d Montie said.<\/p>\n
Within months, Montie helped Spagnola get specialized testing that confirmed a diagnosis of primary aldosteronism, a condition in which one adrenal gland malfunctions. \u201cSomething that I started looking into in 2022, I now within two months have an official diagnosis and a pathway to a cure, which is really cool and really nice to have gotten those answers so quickly,\u201d Spagnola said.<\/p>\n
Spagnola and her daughter both see Montie. Spagnola also keeps health insurance through work and pairs it with the monthly Heirloom membership \u2014 an approach Montie said is common. \u201cHealth insurance is still very important for catastrophic events,\u201d Montie said. \u201cSome patients are opting for a higher deductible plan with lower healthcare premiums and pairing that with the direct primary care,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Montie also said some patients have found cash-pay pricing can be more affordable than insurance-based pricing, leading to hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in savings for some families.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe monthly membership is something I don’t even notice,\u201d Spagnola said. \u201cI would say that if I had started with working with heirloom, I would have probably saved about $2,000,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Montie said direct primary care can also reduce weekend trips to urgent care. She said it can be a good option for people with nontraditional jobs who do not have insurance, as well as people who change jobs frequently and do not want to switch providers every time their insurance changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As health care grows more complicated and insurance prices continue to rise, some patients are turning to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":888335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-888334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/888335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}