The medical profession is undergoing a quiet but growing revolution and a new sub-set of health care providers is forming. While millions of uninsured Americans struggle to mitigateMitigate: make less severe the financial and emotional toll health care expenses have on their lives, many physicians are becoming increasingly frustrated and disappointed with the limiting hurdles imposed upon them by the medical insurance industry. Saying "many physicians" may need evidence to back Resentful of the financial losses from being forced to accept reduced “negotiated” fees and further stymied by directives from a business person in a corporate office dictating patient care, an increasing number of health care providers are rejecting the medical insurance industry completely and have begun to transform their clinics into nontraditionalWhat is traditional? Call, make appointment, arrive, sign in, sit, wait, nurse, 5 minutes with doctor, receive script, pay to sign out, CVS, wait 3 hours, return to CVS to pay... Blah practices that provide high-end, “luxury” styleLuxury, like including massage and waterfall entrance. healthcare. Referred to as “Concierge Care”, “Boutique Medicine”, “VIP Medicine”, and more recently “Direct Practice”, the movement surfaced in Seattle in the 1990’s and was touted as a new business opportunity designed to provide superior quality and greatest availability of healthcare to a limited market niche of “discerning” patients in exchange for annual retainer fees – usually hundreds or thousands of dollars.Wow, this is interesting. Under this model, physicians do not accept medical insurance.Uh oh. In exchange, the physician offers services that typically include same-day appointments, more face to face time with their doctor, house calls, physician coordination of specialty-care referrals, and around-the-clock telephone, pager, and e-mail access without fighting the dreaded “phone tree”.I have never heard phone tree but gain understanding from your clear description and it's a comical term In principle, the patient receives more personalized care, and the physician avoids the headaches and high costs of overhead required by administrating insurance in their practices. The emergence of boutique medicineBoutique medicine plays on the actualities of a clothing boutique. Small, select clientele, higher end goods and higher prices. or retainer practice is appealing to the select few who can afford such care, however, for the rest of the population the issue raises important medical, ethical, and legal questions.That's great and your appeal is flying all over the place in the news with the Presidential campaign.

New census data taken from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, http://www.cbpp.org/8-26-08pov.htm indicates that although the number of “Americans without health insurance fell from 15.8 percent in 2006 to 15.3 percent in 2007, and the number of uninsured declined by 1.3 million to 45.7 million, the improvement occurred because the increased enrollment in public programs — notably Medicare and Medicaid — more than offset a decline in the portion of the population with employer-sponsored coverage.” I suggest to attempt paraphrasing the prior paragraph, I'm kind of confused. The percentage of Americans with private health insurance has continued to drop steadily over the past several years and was down to 67.5% as of the 2005 census. The costs of insurance premiums have skyrocketed making coverage out of reach for over one-third of our country’s population, and unaffordable for many small and medium sized businesses as well. Data from the Kaiser Family Foundation http://kff.org showshows, add an S that, “on average, employers are requiring employees to contribute more in cost-sharing (i.e., premiums, deductibles, and/or co-payments) for their health insurance and that fewer small businesses are offering health coverage.” The news is even direr Dire: serious, extremely desperate. for minorities groups. The census data shows that lack of health insurance is much more common among people with low incomes, and African-Americans and Hispanics were much more likely to be uninsured than white, non-Hispanic people. Suggestion to include a graph as visual reference.The elderly and/or the infirm Infirm: feeble or weak. are often unable to afford insurance in the individual market.Understandable. Coverage is typically only offered to these individuals at very high rates, or they may be denied insurance completely, because of the entrenched practice of medical “underwriting”.What is underwriting? Clarify in following sentence. This practice denies or greatly limits the amount of insurance offered based on the projection or likelihood that sicker individuals are likely to incur higher health care costs.

My issue now is that I cannot determine your audience. Your words are advanced, I feel like I'm in Newsweek! If your goal is to communicate to a vast amount of readers, especially minorities who will probably side with you, you have to speak in a way they can understand you. Richy Rich is fine sending his wife to boutique medical centers so he won't care about this thought or disagree with what you say. In addition, Richy Rich is the one who will understand this. A minority, say just learning English or did not go through proper schooling to advance vocab, will not flow through this easy and will not sit here with a dictionary like me, and I'm smart. Suggestion: keep this, it's awesome, and create a dumb version.

In light of these numbers, it is clear that the emergence of the concierge care model of medicine contributes to the widening ofREMOVE THESE TWO WORDSthe gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” and amplifies class distinctions. Medical resources available to the uninsured and under insured are undermined in the shift of the best care to a privileged few and raise the murky legal question of discrimination.Discrimination is murky for sure, great word Yet, Concierge Practice provides an environment of health care that focuses on wellness and prevention rather than on diagnosis and treatment – a focus that is lacking in traditional medicine and is often ignored as an aspect of medical insurance. Proponents Proponent: person who advocates theory. of Concierge Care argue that with fewer patients to see and less paperwork, physicians’ attitudes and level of career satisfaction improves and they have more time to engage in altruistic activities beneficial to public health such as volunteering services to community clinics and increasing humanitarian or charity care. One local family practice physician, Dr. Stacey Robinson, is devoting her time and energy to search for an alternative to the traditional family practice model and the concierge care model. Dr. Robinson is attempting to build her clinical practice by combining elements that have heretofore been mutually exclusive – providing high end, quality care emphasizing wellness to all patients regardless of income, while simultaneously rejecting insurance company payments and policies.Sounds like a great plan. With a combined patient base of retainer patientsWhat are retainer patients? and indigentIndigent: poor. care patients, she believes she can provide all her patients with exemplary care by employing the Robin Hood model – take from the rich to give to the poor…

Young, bright and deeply caring, Dr. Robinson has long been dogged by the often contrary goals of caring for her patients on the level she feels they deserve and the hurdles she and other physician face by the rules and regulations of the managed care insurance industry. New paragraph. She received her medical degree at Tulane Medical School in 1996 and among other distinctions, served as Medical Director of the Primary Care Clinic at MacDill AFB as an Air Force Major. She prefers Stacey to Dr. Robinson and is as comfortable in her softball clothes as she is in her white coat and is as kind and generous of spirit as she is efficient and practical. In other words, dr. robinson is down to earth. Highly active in charitable work, she and her husband, who is an anesthesiologist, spend enormous amounts of their personal time and money working to help the less privileged Less priviledged meaning poor? handicapped? single? even as they juggle the demands of their careers and their two young children. Juggling children! = ) Driven by her desire to help those less fortunate and supported by her belief in a more holistic approach to medicine that combines a mind-body-spirit approach to wellness, Stacey embarked on a quest last year to open her own practice. I suggest revealing her holistic appraoch sooner than this. Intrigued by the benefits of the concierge model, yet disturbed by the negative impact on the poor, Stacey is striving to find a balance. Being bound to the insurance industry was not an option, nor did she want to build her practice on the elitist element inherent in the Concierge Medicine model. How could she practice what she loved, survive financially and still give back? Months of reflection brought her to the idea of a self-sustaining family practice that could provide concierge care and indigent care in equal amounts. Looking for a model to build from, her research revealed only one other practice in the country that had attempted to make this model work; St. Luke’s Family Practice in Modesto, California. Inspired and energized, she started her practice several months ago in June of 2008, and as one can see on her website, http://www.robinsonfamilymedicine.com/giving_back, her personal vision is reflected in this message: “The best solution to this health care crisis will come from within our community not from politicians.”