Health Insurance is Not Healthcare
We didn’t leave corporate medicine just to build a smaller version of it.
Why We Chose Direct Primary Care
I was so excited when Donna agreed to start a primary care practice with me.
First of all, you need to know—I’m not a doctor. So obviously, this doesn’t happen without her. Second, between the two of us, I’m by far the big risk taker, and she’s much more conservative. So when she finally said yes to this journey, it meant the world to me.
At first, we thought we were going to open a standard primary care clinic. It was familiar, it was proven, and we had contacts who had done it successfully. But there were some real problems with that plan.
The first issue? I have zero experience in healthcare. If I was going to be the practice manager, I had a steep learning curve ahead of me. That part wasn’t daunting, necessarily—but one thing I kept hearing from our colleagues over and over again stuck with me: “In private practice, you’re not in the business of providing healthcare. You’re in the business of collecting money from insurance.”
Which brings me to the second issue: insurance.
I’ve never billed insurance before, and if reimbursement was going to be the backbone of our clinic, I didn’t have a whole lot of confidence we’d succeed—especially in Hawaiʻi, where insurance companies enjoy near-monopoly status.
But the biggest issue? The whole reason we wanted to do this in the first place was to stop working for "the man."
Both of us had become totally jaded by corporate America. And to be fair, it’s not really about any one individual. My boss was just trying to do a good job to please his boss, and that chain goes all the way up to the CEO, who’s just trying to return a profit to shareholders. And I get it—I'm a shareholder in companies too, and I also want good returns on my investments. But at some point, we had to acknowledge this truth:
We’re all part of a system that prioritizes profit over people. And changing companies wouldn’t change that. So building an insurance-based clinic just felt like a different flavor of working for the same machine.
That’s when we started exploring other business models. Donna had heard about Direct Primary Care (DPC) from a colleague and was really intrigued. I loved the premise immediately.
It strips out a huge portion of corporate greed.
It hinges on the patient-doctor relationship.
And it allows for high-quality healthcare at an impressively low cost.
Yes, DPC is still in its nascent stages. Yes, choosing this model comes with risk. But we realized: if we opened a traditional clinic, we’d always look back and wonder, “What if we’d tried DPC instead?”
So we’re going for it.
What This Means for You
We believe you’ll experience something radically different with us—right from the first interaction.
It might look like:
A real person answering the phone, instead of an automated menu.
Quick, clear treatment plans handled over text/email—because the doctor doesn’t get paid more for more visits.
Deeply personal relationships with your physician—because she has a panel of a few hundred patients, not two thousand.
2:00 PM appointments that start at 2:00 PM, and don’t feel rushed.
The feeling that your healthcare team is actually working for you, not besides you.
When we were doing our due diligence, we spoke to about a dozen DPC doctors. And you know what?
Not one of them said they’d ever go back to the traditional model.
That kind of loyalty and conviction from the physicians? Of course I want that for my wife. To me, that’s the best sign that physicians have found their calling - caring for patients.
