Lay of the Land: Primary Care, Provider Payments and What’s Next

High-quality primary care is the foundation of an efficient, effective and comprehensive health care system. Primary care serves as the main entry point into health care for families, children, aging adults and individuals across the country and acts as an essential setting for enhancing patients’ experience with the health care system while improving affordability and reducing inequities.

Yet, the U.S. primary care system is in crisis.

Despite its importance, primary care has been historically undervalued and decisions relating to primary care are often dominated by industry in an effort to preserve the status quo business model at the expense of consumers. Consumer advocates and allied stakeholders have a critical role to play in transforming our health care system to one that centers primary care to meet the diverse health needs of our communities and provide a meaningful counterweight to the influence of the health care industry.

Policymakers must take steps to strengthen our nation’s primary care workforce and infrastructure through critical improvements to how primary care practitioners are paid. It is essential that advocates work with policymakers to rebalance health care payment rates to more accurately value primary care providers and shift U.S. health care payment away from the inefficiencies of fee-for-service economics and toward a system that enables and incentivizes health care providers to deliver high-quality, high-value care, including comprehensive and advanced primary care.

To aid in this work, this publication outlines the problems facing the primary care system and details promising efforts taking place to promote access to high-quality, comprehensive primary care for all people in the U.S.