It is a membership. You pay the practice directly, the practice does not bill your insurance, and what you get back is time and access. Here is the whole idea without the jargon.
An insurance based primary care practice does not get paid for care. It gets paid for documented, coded, billable visits. That single fact shapes everything downstream. The practice has to see a very large number of patients to stay solvent, so panels grow, visits shrink, and a meaningful share of the staff exists to fight with payers rather than to look after you.
You feel it as a seven minute appointment, a six week wait, and a doctor typing while you talk.
Take billing out and the economics invert. The practice no longer needs volume, so it can cap the panel. A smaller panel means longer visits, real availability, and a doctor who remembers your history without reading it off a screen.
This is the part worth reading twice. A membership covers your primary care with the practice. It does not cover hospital stays, surgery, specialists, advanced imaging, or emergency care.
A membership is not health insurance and does not replace it. Most members carry a high deductible health plan alongside a membership, so the everyday care is handled here and the catastrophic risk stays covered.
People use the words interchangeably and they should not. Concierge practices typically charge a large annual retainer and still bill your insurance for the visits themselves. Direct primary care charges a flat monthly fee and does not bill insurance at all.
That is why the monthly cost of direct primary care is usually a fraction of a concierge retainer. The model is designed to be affordable rather than exclusive.
Members often find that the things that used to trigger a copay, an urgent care visit, or a specialist referral get handled in a message or a longer appointment instead. Practices in this model also commonly pass through wholesale pricing on labs and on many generic medications, which can cost less than an insurance copay.
What Mind and Body includes, and at what price, will be published in full before enrollment opens.
Most direct primary care practices stop at primary care. Mind and Body is being built so that mental health care sits inside the same membership rather than being referred out to a separate waitlist and a separate bill. Join the waitlist and we will send the full scope as it is finalised.
Founding memberships are open now. No payment until we open.