Concierge Medicine, Direct Primary Care, and the Quiet Subtraction of Physician Capacity: What Shrinking Panels Do to Wait Times, Access, and Everyone Who Cannot Write the Check

Your doctor just sent a heavy envelope. Inside: a note saying the practice is going concierge. Annual fee $2,200. And somewhere between 1,400 and 2,100 patients on that panel are about to go find someone else. Here is what that means at scale.

There are roughly 12,000 to 15,000 US physicians now in concierge or DPC models. Sounds like 5-6% of the primary…