Doctor’s Orders

STRANGERCROMBIE WINNER! This article was bought-and-paid-for in The Stranger’s annual charity auction—which this year raised more than $50,000 for the Seattle nonprofit Treehouse, helping foster kids since 1988. Thank you, everybody!

After 12 years at the helm of Long Live the Kings, a
Seattle-
based salmon-conservation nonprofit, Barbara Cairns
encountered a problem. Providing health care for her dozen employees
was “getting more and more expensive,” she says. Insurance premiums,
then about $600 a month per employee, were going up between 10 and 20
percent every year. Moreover, her staff was complaining of substandard
health care: Doctor’s visits were rushed, and employees faced a
perplexing maze of specialists because their primary physicians were
too busy to coordinate their health care.

“As someone who provides health care to my employees, looking at the
increasing costs of that to the organization, and seeing my own
frustrations about how to handle my own health care, I stepped back to
look at what we were doing,” Cairns says.

According to a U.S. Census report released last year, 47 million
Americans lack health insurance—a 22 percent increase since 2000.
Many of them are the so-called working poor—people who have jobs
but nonetheless struggle to pay for their families’ basic needs, such
as housing, food, and health care. According to a 2006 study by the
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, more than a third of small
businesses don’t provide health insurance to their employees. And the
number of small businesses that don’t offer health coverage is
growing.

But Cairns found a program that allows Long Live the Kings to buck
the trend. Qliance, a 15-month-old company based in a downtown Seattle
clinic, saves money by cutting out the middlemen: bloated
health-
insurance companies that require doctors and insurance
administrators to manage collections and payments on every service.
Instead, Qliance charges a flat monthly fee of about $60 for basic
health care. Employers then take out a separate—and less
expensive—catastrophic health-insurance policy, which covers
things like car accidents and strokes. Employers also pay into a fund
that employees can access for at-cost prescriptions from the Qliance
pharmacy.

As of January 1, instead of being restricted to 15-minute
appointments, employees can see a doctor for a half hour to an hour;
instead of going to a doctor no more than a few times a year, employees
can visit their doctor as often as they need; instead of paying
co-pays, employees’ costs are built into the monthly charge; and
instead of paying $620 a month, Long Live the Kings pays just $360.

“If we did nothing different, I don’t know that we could have
continued to afford the same level of insurance coverage,” says
Cairns.

The idea is winning converts. Qliance’s clinic currently has six
physicians and nearly 2,000 patients (a mix of employer-funded and
individual members). But demand from 18 employers south of Seattle is
driving Qliance to open a new clinic in Kent with capacity for 6,400
patients.

Dr. Garrison Bliss, a cofounder of Qliance, had a similar
monthly-payment practice on First Hill with two other doctors, but
opened Qliance to expand the model.

“This is meant to scale,” says Bliss, sitting in Qliance’s downtown
clinic, where his dark khaki slacks match the walls. “This model is
mean to bring care to millions of people, not just a few hundred.”

The current employer-funded health-
insurance model has been
wreaking systemic problems on the economy, Bliss says—draining
paychecks and making everything more expensive. For instance, the three
leading Detroit auto manufacturers claim that health-care costs
increase the price of each vehicle by more than $1,500.

“The employer has been funding an extravagant medical-insurance
party for the last 50 years,” Bliss says. “And that party is about to
come to an end, because the employers won’t have this money to spend
[on health insurance] anymore.”