Here’s another reason Direct Primary Care is growing rapidly across the country. Consumers demand better access, employers demand lower costs, and physicians want back their freedom to do what they are trained to do without third-party interference. Corporate owned physicians solve none of those problems, only exacerbate them – Bill Rusteberg
By Melissa (Missy) Starowitz on Linkedin
I keep seeing “18%” quoted everywhere. It’s the share of physicians who still own their practice, and it gets used as shorthand for how far independence has fallen. Four out of five doctors now employed. Only 18% left standing.
The number is real. But I think people are reading the wrong thing into it.
It gets treated as proof that physicians don’t want independence anymore, as if the low number reflects a change in preference. That’s not what it reflects. When you actually ask physicians, the ones in physician-led settings report far higher satisfaction with their say in how their work runs than employed physicians do. Large numbers of employed physicians say lost autonomy is the worst part of their job. A lot of them say they’d go back to independence if they could.
So the 18% isn’t a measure of what physicians want. It’s a measure of what the economics have allowed. Those are completely different things.
That distinction matters, especially if you’re a physician sitting in an employed job wondering if independence is still realistic. The reason most doctors are employed isn’t that they concluded ownership was a bad idea. It’s that the conditions got hard enough that many couldn’t make the move, even when they wanted to.
The wanting never went away. And the conditions, as I wrote about earlier this week, are finally starting to shift. A number that low has nowhere to go but up if the support keeps building.