Up to $6M over 3 years. Up to 90 more family doctors in Manitoba by 2028-29, mostly for rural and northern towns. Good. Bringing in internationally trained doctors faster is a real win. Now the harder part: keeping them. Doctors in Canada spend about 9 hours a week on admin. They say nearly half of it is unnecessary. Recruit doctors, then bury them in forms? That's a leaky bucket. Direct primary care is one model that cuts the paperwork, not the doctor.

$93,000. That's the stroke bill a 45-year-old travel nurse in Florida got. He'd been uninsured because his agency's plan would have cost $3,600 a month for him and his wife. Then it gets worse. In March, his vision and balance started going wrong. He went to urgent care instead of the ER. "I was so afraid of dealing with the billing issues again that I did not want to go to the emergency room." A nurse. Who knew exactly what those symptoms could mean. He landed in the ER anyway, with a second stroke. He can't work as a nurse anymore. Fear of the bill is now a symptom. It shows up in the history before the stroke does. (Doctor note: face droop, slurred speech, sudden vision or balance loss? Call 911. Fight about the bill later.) The front door doesn't have to be scary. A flat monthly fee. Your doctor's cell. Labs and meds at posted prices. No surprise bill 6 weeks later in codes nobody can read. Keep insurance for the stroke. But nobody should be afraid to find out if they're having one. What's the longest you've put off care because you were scared of the bill?

10 years after The Daily Stoic came out, its authors reread it page by page and found more in it. Direct care is that reread applied to medicine. The old family doctor, read again with texting, wholesale meds, and a posted price. Not nostalgia. New things from an old book. What's one thing your doctor did 20 years ago that you wish they still did?

1% higher health premiums. About 0.76% fewer Americans starting businesses. Economists call it entrepreneurship lock. Small businesses have created about 6 of every 10 net new US jobs since 1995. Make most care too cheap to insure, and you unlock the people who'd build them.

16 years. AtlasMD opened in 2010 and has never raised its membership price. Abundance in health care doesn't start with another program. It starts with letting doctors open their own doors. A doctor, a small office, and a price patients can see. Just let us build.

$10 million a minute. That's what the US spent on healthcare in 2024. $5.3 trillion total. $15,474 per person. And Americans get about half as many in-person doctor visits per person as people in peer countries. Highest bill on earth. Half the visits. The money isn't buying more care. It's buying plumbing: claims, codes, denials, and the people paid to argue about them. Direct care skips the plumbing. Flat monthly fee. No claim. No code. No denial. More time with your doctor, for less. Keep insurance for the wreck. Stop running the blood pressure pill through the most expensive pipes in the world.