Is Direct Care a Flop? Yes and in the Best Way

In the 1960s, the sport of high jumping had stalled out. Athletes had tried every variation—straddle, scissors, western roll—but the records stopped inching higher. Then came Dick Fosbury.

At the 1968 Olympics, Fosbury showed up with a strange new technique: instead of going face-down or sideways over the bar, he threw himself over backwards, head first. It looked bizarre. Commentators laughed. But it worked. He cleared 2.24 meters, won gold, and shattered the plateau. Within a few years, every high jumper in the world was doing the “Fosbury Flop.”

The same thing happened in running. For decades, the four-minute mile was considered physiologically impossible. Then Roger Bannister broke it in 1954. The next year, dozens more did too. The barrier was never about biology—it was about belief and method.

Healthcare today looks a lot like those sports before their breakthroughs. Policymakers, insurers, and employers have tried every tiny tweak: higher deductibles, bigger networks, smaller networks, new acronyms, shiny apps. None of it has broken the plateau of skyrocketing costs and declining satisfaction.

Direct primary care is the Fosbury Flop. Instead of trying to run insurance through every routine doctor’s visit, we step back and say: what if most care is too cheap to insure in the first place? What if we rebuild the model so patients pay directly for a membership that offers unlimited visits, free procedures, and medications and labs at up to 95% savings? Suddenly, the impossible becomes obvious.

When the model changes, the records fall. Direct care has already delivered a 10x improvement in affordability for patients and employers who try it. The only thing standing in the way of mass adoption is old habits—just like track and field before 1968.

The bar isn’t too high. We just need to flip over it.