Home / Guides / What Is Direct Primary Care — and Is It Right for My Family?

What Is Direct Primary Care — and Is It Right for My Family?

By Foothill Family Medicine · Medically reviewed by our medical team · June 12, 2026

If you’ve ever waited three weeks for a ten-minute appointment, been rushed out before you finished your questions, or opened a bill you couldn’t make sense of, you already understand the problem direct primary care was built to solve.

This guide explains what direct primary care is, what it costs, how it’s different from insurance and from concierge medicine, and how to tell whether it’s a good fit for your family.

The short version

Direct primary care (DPC) is a membership. You pay your doctor a flat monthly fee — directly — and in exchange you get unhurried visits, direct access to your physician, and care that isn’t billed through insurance. No copays for your visits. No surprise bills. No insurance company sitting between you and your doctor for everyday care.

That’s the whole idea: take the insurance paperwork out of primary care, and the time and attention come back.

How it actually works

In a typical insurance-based practice, a family doctor may be responsible for 2,000 or more patients. That math is what produces seven-minute visits and long waits. A direct primary care physician deliberately keeps a much smaller panel — often a few hundred patients — so there’s time to actually know you. The American Academy of Family Physicians describes DPC as a model that “gives family physicians a meaningful alternative to fee-for-service insurance billing,” charging patients a periodic fee for primary care services instead (AAFP).

In practice, membership usually means:

• Longer visits, scheduled close in — appointments measured in real minutes, often same-week.
• Direct access — message, call, or text your physician’s office during the day instead of a phone tree.
• Same- and next-day appointments for urgent needs.
• Prevention and chronic-condition care as part of the membership, not an add-on.
• Wholesale-priced labs and common medications — because the practice isn’t marking them up through insurance, routine bloodwork and many generics can cost a fraction of the retail price.

What it costs — and why that’s the point

One of the clearest differences with DPC is that the price is posted. You know what you’ll pay before you join. That matters: surveys consistently find most patients want an upfront, out-of-pocket estimate before they get care, and that price transparency is one of the strongest drivers of trust in a practice.

At Foothill, our membership pricing is published openly:

• Direct Primary Care — $130/month per adult, $50/month per child, with a $300/month whole-family cap.
• Concierge — a higher-touch tier at $250/month per adult, $100/month per child, $600/month family cap.
• A one-time $150 registration fee applies when you join.

That’s the whole price. Billed monthly, cancel anytime with 30 days’ notice. (Important: this is a membership for primary care services — it is not health insurance. More on that below.)

DPC is not insurance — and you’ll usually still want a plan

This is the most important thing to understand, so we’ll say it plainly: a DPC membership is not health insurance, and it is not a substitute for it.

DPC covers your primary care — the everyday medicine a family doctor handles. It does not cover a hospital stay, surgery, the emergency room, specialists, or expensive imaging. For those, you still want insurance.

The combination most DPC families use is a higher-deductible or catastrophic health plan paired with a DPC membership. The insurance is there for the big, rare, expensive events; the membership handles the frequent, everyday care — with far more time and access than a typical insured visit, and often at a lower all-in cost once you factor in the wholesale labs and medications.

Many families can also use HSA dollars in connection with care like this — the rules have specifics worth understanding, which we cover in a separate guide.

DPC vs. concierge medicine — they’re not the same

People often use these terms interchangeably. They’re different, and the difference matters for what you pay and what you get. The short version: most concierge practices still bill your insurance and charge a separate (often much larger, annual) retainer on top for access, while DPC removes insurance from primary care entirely in exchange for the monthly membership. We break the distinction down fully in Direct primary care vs. concierge medicine: the honest difference.

Is direct primary care right for your family?

DPC tends to be a strong fit if you:

• Are tired of rushed visits and want a doctor who has time to know you.
• Manage an ongoing condition (or care for a child or parent who does) and value direct access.
• Already have — or are willing to pair this with — a higher-deductible or catastrophic insurance plan.
• Want predictable, transparent costs for everyday care.

It may be a weaker fit if you rely on a low-deductible plan that already covers primary care at little out-of-pocket cost and you don’t place a premium on time and access — though even then, many families find the experience difference is the deciding factor.

If you’re weighing a switch, our short checklist — 5 questions to ask before you leave your current doctor — is a good next step.

A note on who’s behind Foothill

Foothill Family Medicine is a direct primary care practice opening in Glendora, in the San Gabriel Valley. It’s led by a board-certified family medicine physician with years of experience caring for local families — now building a deliberately small practice to do primary care the way it should be done: more time, real relationships, transparent pricing.

We’ll introduce your physician here by name soon. In the meantime, we’re a small practice now forming — early members keep their founding rate, and there’s no payment to join the waitlist.

This guide is general information about how care and membership work — it is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for care from your own physician.