Urgent Care Centers Offering ‘Membership Programs’ May Be More Expensive

A new report by Yale researchers finds that urgent care centers nationwide have begun offering membership programs as an alternative to insurance, but those programs may not save patients any money.

The report, published in the August 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that some urgent care centers are marketing and advertising the membership programs in an attempt to entice new patients. However, that work may not actually be cost-effective for patients, researchers wrote.

“These membership programs may offer convenience and improve access to care for uninsured and underinsured patients,” the researchers wrote. “However, there are serious disadvantages including limited continuity of care and additional fees for imaging and laboratory services. These programs are unlikely to save most people money.”

Membership fees ranged from $50 to $800 per year, and cannot be paid through health savings accounts or other forms of insurance. Researchers concluded that an average visit might cost $100, but average membership fees cost $400, meaning that patients would need to have at least four visits per year to make the fee cost-effective.

“While efforts at concierge medicine have been in and out of vogue for decades now, our fragile delivery system is less and less capable of accommodating so much fragmentation,” said Howard Forman, MD, Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Public Health (Health Policy, Management, and Economics, one of the authors of the study. “When more well-heeled patients are accessing convenient urgent care centers (irrespective of whether they are delivering quality care or not), it leaves larger centers to bear more of the burden of the uninsured and underinsured. That is not sustainable.”

Assistant Professor Daniel Wiznia, MD’s team first noticed the discrepancies last year during a project looking into the role of urgent care centers with orthopaedic care. His team then noticed a trend of membership programs. "These membership programs are being marketed, sometimes as a form of insurance, to uninsured or under-insured individuals who may not realize the limitations of these programs,” said Wiznia, who also authored the letter reporting the findings in JAMA. “Regulation surrounding the marketing of these membership programs needs to evolve to protect the consumer so that they can make educated cost effective decisions.”