MaineHealth Now Sells Primary Care for $119 a Month

On September 28, MaineHealth cut a ribbon in Brunswick. It was the second clinic for Trellis Health, the system's membership primary care arm. The first sits on Congress Street in Portland.

The price is right there on the website. $119 a month for an individual. $109 if you pay for the year. $109 per person for families. Primary care, physical therapy, behavioral health, medication management, health coaching, and annual labs are listed at $0 once you're in.

Read that again. The biggest health system in Maine looked at the way it has billed primary care for decades and decided to sell a membership instead.

I won't pretend that doesn't feel like vindication. For years independent direct care doctors were told this was a boutique fad, a concierge thing, a model that couldn't scale. Now a hospital system is copying the menu, down to the published price.

But copying the menu is not the same as cooking the meal.

Trellis says its members had roughly 30% fewer ER visits, admissions, and specialist referrals. Maybe. The release that carried that number came with no sample size, no comparison group, and no time window. Until it does, it's a belief, not a result.

And the fine print wobbles. One page on the Trellis site says that when you join, they take over as your primary care team. Another page, written for members of an insurance plan that paid the fee, says Trellis is an addition, not a replacement, and you don't have to leave your doctor. Both were live on October 1. Those are two different products. Only one of them is a doctor who knows you.

That insurance plan is Mending Health. It covered the Trellis membership in full. It leaves Maine on January 1, 2027.

So here is what the ribbon actually tells us. Patients want a price they can read. Employers want a monthly number they can budget. Even hospital systems now know the fee-for-service visit is a lousy way to buy primary care.

The question is who holds the scissors. A system that owns the hospital, the imaging, and the specialists has every reason to keep the referral pipeline full. An independent doctor whose only revenue is the membership has every reason to keep you out of it.

$119 a month is a fair number to put on a website. The hard part is what happens after you join.

www.dpcinsider.com/blog/2026-10-01-trellis-second-clinic-mending-insurer-exit/