Intrinsically Healthy.

Ascent Internal Medicine This is a long explanation of the various ways in which using insurance negatively affects the delivery of high quality health care and how Direct Primary Care enables the health care you need.

Insurers drive moral injury and burnout in physicians - over 50% of working physicians have at least one symptom of being depression. This leads to increased medical errors. Direct Primary Care is a solution for both patients and physicians by putting the physician back in control of how they practice medicine, which benefits patients. Insurer controlled health care is harming both patients and physicians, so we must make different choices to solve this ethical dilemma.

This is why patients should join Ascent Internal Medicine. Appropriate medical care at the time you need it is necessary for high quality care. Seeing a "preferred provider" (an insurance industry phrase) on their schedule at their clinic reduces the ability to provide high quality care and "preferred providers" are limited by the one sided insurance contracts they sign. Insurance companies get to influence the care you receive, using the preferred provider as a proxy. Direct Primary Care is truly focused on the patient-physician relationship and is transparent.

The Oregon legislature mandated that the Oregon Medical Board provide pain management mandates to all Oregon physiicans wishing to practice in Oregon. The modules stated that the undertreatment of pain will not be tolerated, the patient should be believed regarding the levels of pain, opioid pain medications should be titrated to control the pain and to look for signs of misuse. Given the dysfunctional state of practicing medicine, this was a recipe for disaster. The precepts provided were not taken as guidelines, but more as a mandate - if a patient complained about a physician not treating their pain, that physician's license would be in jeopardy, preventing them from the practice of medicine. This ethical dilemma put physicians licenses in jeopardy, enabled by the medical body purportedly put in charge of protecting the public from harmful physicians.