My Insurance Just Went up!

If you've shopped for family health insurance recently, you already know the number that keeps families up at night: $2,000 to $4,000 a month. That's not a typo, and it's not a worst-case scenario — for many families buying coverage without a big employer or government subsidy behind them, it's just what a mid-tier plan costs today.

Stop and think about what that actually means. That's a mortgage payment. Every single month. And here's the part that makes it sting even more: that premium doesn't include your deductible. After you've paid $30,000–$48,000 a year just to have coverage, you can still be on the hook for another $6,000, $8,000, or more out of pocket before the plan pays for anything beyond preventive care. Families are effectively paying for two houses — the one they live in, and the one they hand over to an insurance company that may not pay out a dollar in a given year.

It's no wonder more and more families are asking: is there a better way?

There is — and it starts with rethinking what "insurance" is actually supposed to do.

Why Traditional Insurance Feels So Broken

Traditional insurance was designed to do two very different jobs at once: pay for your everyday primary care (checkups, sick visits, minor issues) and protect you from financial catastrophe (a surgery, a cancer diagnosis, a hospitalization). Bundling those two very different kinds of risk into one product is a big part of why premiums have exploded — you're paying catastrophic-level prices for routine care you could often get more efficiently somewhere else.

Meanwhile, that same insurance often gets in the way of your primary care experience. A typical insurance-based primary care visit today looks like this: you wait weeks for an appointment, spend most of your visit with a nurse or a rushed 7-minute conversation with your doctor, and the doctor is thinking as much about billing codes and documentation requirements as they are about you. It's not that your doctor doesn't care — it's that the insurance-driven system doesn't give them the time or the incentive to practice medicine the way they were trained to.

A Different Model: DPC Paired With a Healthshare

More and more families are splitting those two jobs back apart, and pairing:

1. Direct Primary Care (DPC) — an affordable monthly membership, typically $50–$150 per person, that gives you direct, unhurried access to your own doctor for everyday and ongoing care.

2. A health sharing program (healthshare) — a lower-cost, membership-based way to share the risk of big, unpredictable medical expenses like surgery, hospitalization, or cancer treatment.

Combined, a family can often get comprehensive protection — from routine care through catastrophic events — for a fraction of a $2,000–$4,000/month insurance premium.

What DPC Actually Gives You

DPC flips the primary care relationship back to how it should be. For a flat monthly fee, you get:

• Same-day or next-day appointments — no more waiting three weeks to be seen for something that's bothering you now

• 30–60 minute visits, not 7 minutes, because your doctor isn't juggling a huge insurance-driven patient panel

• Direct texting, calling, or emailing your doctor — real access, not a portal message queue

• Care built around prevention and relationship, not billing codes

This is a fundamentally different kind of medicine, and it shows in outcomes: patients with real access to their doctor are far more likely to get a problem addressed early, stick with a treatment plan, and avoid the kind of medical drift that turns a manageable issue into an expensive one.

What a Healthshare Adds

DPC handles your everyday and ongoing care beautifully, but it isn't designed to cover a $150,000 surgery or a cancer treatment plan. That's where a healthshare comes in — it exists specifically to protect against the big, unpredictable stuff:

• Emergency room and trauma care

• Hospitalization

• Surgery

• Cancer treatment

• Imaging, labs, and specialist care tied to a major event

Healthshares aren't insurance in the regulatory sense — members voluntarily share each other's eligible medical costs rather than paying premiums to an insurance carrier — and because of that structure, they typically run about half the cost of unsubsidized traditional insurance. That's a meaningful part of why combining DPC with a healthshare so often ends up costing a family a few hundred dollars a month rather than a few thousand.

Seeing the Options Side by Side

Not all healthshares are built the same way, and picking the right one — especially one designed to pair well with a DPC membership — matters. HSA for America publishes a detailed, regularly updated comparison of the major healthshare programs, and it's a genuinely useful starting point if you're weighing your options. A few worth knowing about:

• DPC Direct is built specifically to complement a DPC membership. Rather than duplicating the primary care you're already getting from your DPC doctor, its sharing benefits pick up right where your DPC membership leaves off — ER and trauma care, hospitalization, specialist care, surgery, imaging, and more, with unshareable amounts (similar to a deductible) starting around $1,000, and member contributions starting near $190/month.

• netWell Healthshare's Advantage tier is a catastrophic-only option — ER visits, hospitalization, in/outpatient surgery, and lab costs — around $195/month, explicitly meant to be paired with a DPC-style primary care arrangement.

• OneShare Health's Catastrophic plan is similarly designed for major expenses only (not routine doctor visits), which the company itself positions as a good fit alongside a DPC membership.

• HSA Secure is one of the few options that's HSA-qualified, meaning you can also contribute to a tax-advantaged Health Savings Account while your major-expense risk is shared — contributions run roughly $170–$295/month individually.

• Universal Thrive, JHS Community, Sedera, Medi-Share, and others each have their own tradeoffs — some have faith-based membership requirements, some have longer pre-existing condition waiting periods, some offer higher sharing limits or lower member-responsibility amounts.

The details that actually matter when comparing plans: the unshareable/member-responsibility amount (your deductible-equivalent), pre-existing condition waiting periods, whether there's a statement of faith requirement, HSA compatibility, and the maximum annual and lifetime sharing limits. A plan that looks cheap on the surface can end up being the wrong fit if your family has an ongoing condition or is planning for a pregnancy in the next year.

The Bigger Payoff: Better Care, Lower Total Cost

Here's the part that often gets missed in the premium-vs-premium comparison: the savings don't stop at the monthly bill.

When you have real, unhurried access to your own doctor — someone who actually knows you and answers the phone — you stop defaulting to the emergency room or urgent care for things that don't need to be there. A worrying rash, a kid's fever that won't break, a nagging cough: instead of a $150–$300 urgent care copay or a $1,000+ ER bill, it's a same-day call or visit with your DPC doctor, often at no additional cost beyond your membership.

That shift matters more than it sounds like it should. Unnecessary ED and urgent care visits are one of the biggest drivers of excess healthcare spending in this country, and they happen largely because people either can't get in to see their regular doctor in time, or don't have a regular doctor to call at all. DPC closes that gap. Fewer unnecessary ED and urgent care visits means lower total healthcare spending for your family — on top of the premium savings you're already getting by moving away from traditional insurance.

Bringing It Together

A traditional insurance plan asks a family to pay a mortgage-sized premium every month, then still face a deductible before it does much of anything — while giving you less time with your doctor and a strong financial incentive to route routine problems through expensive urgent and emergency care.

A DPC membership paired with the right healthshare flips that: real access and real time with your doctor for everyday care, and dedicated protection against the financial catastrophe of surgery, hospitalization, or cancer — usually for a fraction of what a traditional plan costs, with fewer unnecessary ED and urgent care visits along the way.

If you're a patient at our practice, you already have the DPC half of that equation. We're happy to talk through which healthshare option makes the most sense for your family's situation — your health history, whether you're planning for a pregnancy, your budget, and your comfort level with the details above. Reach out, and let's build a plan that actually works for your family, without the mortgage-sized price tag.

As Always, stay well,

Sandra Koehn DO

This article is for general educational purposes and is not a guarantee of coverage or benefits under any specific healthshare program. Healthshares are not insurance and are not regulated as insurance in most states — sharing of medical costs is voluntary and not guaranteed. Always review a program's guidelines in full, and consult with a licensed advisor, before enrolling.