Instead of allowing my bias to sneak in, I’ll let you know outright that I like the Walgreens idea for its new retail Take Care Clinics that are intended to diagnose and treat patients with chronic conditions, among other services, including the availability of obtaining a prescription for medication where appropriate.
You can read more about the clinics in newspaper reports today, as well as visiting Walgreens websites which indicate where the clinics are operating, what insurance they accept, and what services they provide at what cost.
I’m giving this a big thumbs up with one significant wildcard, whether Walgreens can maintain reasonable costs that are less expensive than visiting family physicians.
This is no small concern since limitless greed has been the hallmark of healthcare provider charges to consumers for many years.
Further complicating the matter is the fact that the clinics do accept some insurance coverages which means that it’s likely clinic fees will be part of the mix of usual and customary charges for various services upon which insurance company base their levels of coverage. This could lower the allowable charges that insurance companies cover for similar services delivered by physician offices meaning that individuals will be shifted into clinics rather than having choice, or it could tempt Walgreens to raise charges to get closer to what physicians charge because insurance companies will cover it. Both would undermine the benefit of these clinics.
There are reasons that the clinics should be able to maintain a 30 to 40 percent cheaper charge menu, most notably because they are not staffed by physicians. For years, consumers have been paying physician’s charges for certain services even though many of us already know that physician’s assistants and nurses are frequently the ones providing a particular service. Instead of lowering fees based on their increased reliance on non-physician staff, physicians have managed to keep raising charges and growing their own incomes.
So, while we live in a pay for service healthcare world, Walgreens can remain competitive by focusing on the sheer practicality of WHO is providing the treatment, something physicians could have done except that they used their stranglehold on access as a means of charging as much as the market would bear.
There is also a risk that physicians will charge more for services not available at retail clinics as they seek to replace lost dollars from patients who use clinics where possible.
It should also be noted that physicians have already criticized the clinics as making it difficult to keep track of patient care when patients visit various clinics, and that clinics don’t have all the resources available at physician’s offices. Both these complaints could be valid but, there are also increasing numbers of people who see no physician at all because of the copayments and coinsurance costs, in addition to the endless defensive medicine strategies taken by physicians, as well as the increasing number of us who find ourselves making annual changes to the healthcare providers we use because of changes in our insurance plans.
The clinics are a step in the right direction, in my opinion, and as experience unfolds with them, it is my hope that they will succeed in improving access to and affordability of quality healthcare.
