Dr. Shannon Scholl asked an endoscopy center what Medicare pays them per case, offered to pay exactly that, and now prices a colonoscopy at $1,500 all in, against a $2,500 to $4,000 local market. She left a 14 year private GI practice after her daughter spent three months in the hospital and the doctors dismissed what she told them.

A hospital board president told Dr. Jennifer Allen he would eat 40 kinds of crow if her Direct Primary Care practice worked. She now has three clinics, 14 employees, and around 2,000 patients across Hermann, Washington, and O'Fallon, Missouri. She was a nurse and nurse practitioner for 18 years first, and a patient paid her way through medical school.

Dr. Aerie Chung opened a Direct Specialty Care infectious disease practice at the end of 2019, then the pandemic arrived and, as an ID doctor watching the abuse aimed at her specialty, her first instinct was to become invisible. She stopped marketing infectious disease, added integrative care and IV infusions, and now has more acupuncture visits than medical ones.