If you're a business owner searching for ways to lower what you spend on employee health benefits, you've probably already run into the same wall most employers do: traditional group health insurance premiums keep climbing, and the usual "fixes" — higher deductibles, narrower networks, dropping coverage tiers — all amount to shifting cost onto your employees rather than actually solving the problem.
There's a model more employers in the 4–80 employee range are turning to instead: pairing Direct Primary Care (DPC) with either traditional insurance or a health sharing plan. It's not a gimmick or a workaround — it's a structural change in how primary care gets paid for, and it's saving some employers thousands of dollars a month without reducing what their team actually gets.
Why Traditional Group Insurance Is So Expensive
A large share of what you're paying for in a traditional group plan isn't really about catastrophic risk — it's about administrative overhead and the cost of routine, everyday primary care getting run through the insurance billing system. Every annual physical, every sick visit, every prescription refill check-in gets processed, coded, and priced through the same expensive machinery that's meant for major medical events. That drives premiums up for everyone, whether your team is using much care or not.
DPC changes that math by taking primary care out of the insurance billing system entirely.
How the DPC Model Works for Employers
Instead of routing primary care through insurance, you (or your employees) pay a flat monthly membership fee directly to a DPC practice. That membership typically includes:
Unlimited or near-unlimited primary care visits
Same-day or next-day appointments
Direct access to a doctor (text, call, or email — not a nurse line)
Chronic condition management
Often, discounted labs and medications at cost
Because this is a flat fee with no insurance billing involved, the cost is predictable and dramatically lower per employee than what primary care costs when it's bundled into a traditional premium.
Two Ways Employers Structure This
1. DPC + Traditional Insurance You keep a group health plan for hospitalization, specialists, surgery, and emergency care, but pair it with a DPC membership for primary care. Many employers find they can move to a higher-deductible, lower-premium insurance plan once DPC is covering the everyday care that used to drive utilization — because employees have a doctor who can actually manage minor issues before they become expensive ones.
2. DPC + Health Sharing This is where we've seen the largest savings for employers in our area. Health sharing plans have significantly lower monthly costs than traditional group insurance, but on their own they can leave gaps in access to consistent primary care. Pairing a health sharing plan with a DPC membership closes that gap — employees get a real primary care relationship, and the employer still captures the cost savings of health sharing for larger medical events. A few local employer moved to this combination and cut their monthly health benefits spend by several thousand a month compared to their previous group plan, while giving employees better, faster access to a doctor than they had before.
What Employees Actually Get (and Why They Tend to Like It)
The upgrade isn't just financial for your team. Employees moving from a traditional plan into DPC typically go from 10-15 minute rushed appointments and multi-week waits to same-day access and a doctor who actually has time to talk. For a lot of employees, that's a visible, felt improvement — not a benefits cut dressed up as an "option."
That matters for retention, too. A benefits change that saves the company money but makes care worse for the team is a hard sell. A benefits change that saves money and improves the actual experience of seeing a doctor is a much easier one.
Is This Right for Your Business?
This model tends to make the most sense for employers who:
Have 4–80 employees and are feeling the annual premium increases directly
Are already paying for a health sharing plan and want to strengthen the primary care side of it
Have a high-deductible plan where employees are effectively avoiding the doctor until something's serious
Want to offer a genuinely better benefit without a proportional cost increase
Every business's numbers look a little different depending on group size, current plan structure, and how your team currently uses care. The way to find your actual number is to walk through it directly with a DPC practice that already works with local employers.
Next Step
If you want to see what this could look like for your team specifically — current spend vs. a DPC-paired structure — schedule a consultation and we'll walk through the numbers with you.