In this 2025 YouTube monologue Dr. Ashley Frazee of East Valley Direct Primary Care explains the Direct Primary Care (DPC) model, where patients pay a monthly membership fee for unlimited primary‑care services with no copays. She details how DPC interacts with traditional insurance—patients can still use their insurance for imaging and labs, but the billing process is opaque and often inflated, which she describes as a “racket.” Dr. Frazee then offers practical guidance on locating a trustworthy doctor without insurance: rely on word‑of‑mouth referrals, read online reviews, examine a clinic’s mission, and avoid doctors with no feedback. She notes that many patients seek doctors who listen and care, a theme reflected in her own reviews. Finally, she emphasizes the benefits of an ongoing DPC relationship—knowing a patient’s history, medications, and life context leads to better, barrier‑free care. She invites viewers to ask questions in the comments.
Chapters
And if you don't know what direct primary care is, direct primary care is a model where primary care physicians like myself will take a self-pay monthly membership fee in exchange for their services. The great thing about direct primary care is that that doctor is basically always on call for their patients. So they're usually very receptive to patients coming and going as they need. There's no extra copays or visit fees. There's usually a lot of transparency in how they charge their members and what what they charge for, etc. Every direct primary care doctor's office is different, so I can't vouch for everybody else's. If you have insurance and you want to use your insurance, you have the freedom to get imaging like x-rays, CTs, MRIs through the imaging centers using your insurance as well, as long as the insurance isn't crazy picky. There are just a few plans out there that require that your primary care doctor be contracted through that insurance, and in that case, they're the only ones that can order images and labs, etc. And Yeah, you can't use somebody like me who's not contracted with insurance at all. But most insurances do not care if I'm the one ordering the tests, and therefore you can use your insurance at the imaging center, at the lab, etc. I can even draw my patient's blood here in the office and still have the lab bill your insurance later. I just have no control over what that cost will be if you choose to use your insurance. So just know that. A lot of people will ask me, hey, what's this going to cost me if I use my insurance versus what's it going to cost me if I use— A A self-pay rate, I can only give you the guaranteed self-pay rate. I can't give you what your insurance is going to bill because insurance billing is a lot of nonsense. In all reality, there's a lot of inflation in what insurance bills, and then the imaging center or the lab has set prices as well as to what they'll actually charge. The insurance comes back with, actually, no, here's what we'll allow you to charge. Then they do a whole bunch of things called adjustments where they lower the bill, and then it looks like they negotiated the price down for you when all they really did was take a $10,000 bill and And then magically pay $800 for it. It's very complicated. It's meant to be confusing, and it is a racket. Okay, sometimes the next question you have might be, well, how do I know the next doctor is going to be good because I'm paying for the visit myself? And sometimes that brings a sense of more importance, like I'm paying for this doctor's visit, so I should get out of it what I want, right? I need to know how to find the right doctor. And my advice to you is to look at their reviews or find somebody who's used that doctor in the past. Word of mouth is going to be almost always your best bet in finding a doctor that you wanna see. Almost all of my patients have come to me through other patients telling them, hey, you gotta go see this doctor. But if you don't have any friends who say, hey, I've got this great doctor for you, or if it just doesn't fit, can't make it work for whatever reason, then you've gotta go search them up and look at their reviews. You can look at their website of their clinic and see, does the mission of the clinic align with what you're looking for? If you're just looking for somebody who can take care of you with a cough or a cold, or a stitch here and there. Does that clinic provide that? Yeah, most primary care offices do. Or if you're looking for something completely different, then go to their reviews, specifically that doctor if you can, and see what people are saying. And if the doctor doesn't have any reviews, then it really is Russian roulette at that point. But if you can find some doctors with really great reviews and it matches what you're looking for, that's where you want to go. So I'm finding now that I'm getting a lot of patients who are looking for doctors who have have dismissed them in the past. And that's why a lot of my videos have this kind of theme around doctors dismissing people. When I went out on my own and formed my own clinic and tried to understand, okay, how can I market myself, I went to my own reviews and I started understanding that there was a theme of, oh well, this doctor seems to listen and, and care. And so that was just kind of the theme of my reviews, and so I went with it. So now I'm getting a lot of people who are looking for somebody with listening skills, etc. And so that's my advice for if you're looking for a doctor and you have some specific things that you want to get out of the visit because you're paying for it yourself. Go to the reviews, go to their website, talk to people who may have used them in the past. That's your best bet. And if you don't have insurance, you're maybe an entrepreneur or somebody young, but you still need a doctor, look into self-pay options. It's there for you. It's not a mystery. It's not difficult. I promise it's actually more straightforward. And if you have ongoing needs or you want a doctor that actually knows you, then consider using somebody who does direct primary care like me. Again, it's an ongoing relationship type of care. That doctor tends to get to know you really well and doesn't have a lot of barriers in taking care of you. When they know you really well, then it's easier for them to care for you. For example, if one of my patients calls me up and I've known them for longer than 3 to 6 months, it's pretty easy for me to know their situation in life, their medications, what they need, etc. So just know, if you don't have insurance or your insurance isn't working for you, you've got a lot of options in the self-pay world. I'm Dr. Ashley Frazee. I run East Valley Direct Primary Care. If you have any questions about self-pay medicine or the direct primary care model, feel free to put a comment in, hit me up. You guys have a good day.
