Direct Primary Care vs Insurance: A Clearer Model

The flickering stair and stick figures are not moving. Your brain is.

High-contrast edges, shifting gradients, tiny eye movements called saccades. The visual system tries to predict the world quickly, and in doing so, it invents motion where none exists. Peripheral drift feels real because the brain would rather be fast than perfectly accurate.

Medicine has its own optical illusions.

Insurance-based care often feels dynamic: networks, portals, approvals, codes, referrals. Activity everywhere. Yet much of that movement is administrative motion, not relational depth. The system optimizes for billing velocity and risk distribution. It is efficient at processing claims. It is less efficient at cultivating trust.

Direct Primary Care (DPC) is slower, and therefore clearer. Fewer gradients. Fewer artificial edges. A physician and a patient in sustained relationship, not mediated by reimbursement codes. Payment is transparent. Incentives are aligned. Time is not rationed by a third party.

When you remove the illusion of motion, you can see what is actually moving.

Removing the illusion of motion is a form of epistemic correction. You are aligning perception with reality. It is a movement from appearance to structure. Plato would call it turning from shadows toward the source of light. Modern cognitive science would call it reducing predictive error in a Bayesian system. 

In DPC, the center holds: continuity, access, accountability. In insurance-driven medicine, the periphery flickers: forms, denials, network restrictions. One system privileges throughput. The other privileges attention.

The flickering stair teaches us a simple lesson. Not everything that appears active is meaningful. Not everything that appears slow is stagnant.

Sometimes clarity begins by stepping out of the illusion.