In an October 2025 article in The Self-Insurer, entitled “A Captive Audience for DPCs,” Mike Van Ham, Senior Vice President of Health Risk Management at Captive Resources, discussed the growing role of Direct Primary Care (DPC) within Medical Stop Loss (MSL) group captives.
Below is an excerpt from the article:
Mike Van Ham, SVP of health risk management at Captive Resources, LLC, notes that DPC is still a relatively new care delivery model that may not yet be widely accessible across all regions of the U.S. Another challenge is the difficulty quantifying the long-term value of DPC visits, specifically measuring the prevention of medical events such as a heart attack or chronic disease through more proactive care.
“How can you measure the conditions that never happened?” he asks, noting that while the return on investment may not always be immediately quantifiable, the value of proactive care is significant.
Still, those concerns pale in comparison to a system driven by misaligned incentives that's increasingly unsustainable. The marketplace is evolving, and Van Ham notes a growing dissatisfaction among traditional primary care physicians, including those working within larger hospital systems, who are willing to embrace an unknown and untested method of compensation based on monthly subscriptions rather than health insurance.
“If you talk to the physicians who started and own these direct primary care setups, they’re actively stepping away from a transactional model where patient visits are limited to five minutes in order to meet revenue targets,” he observes. “They want to return to the heart of practicing medicine. They want to get to know their patients, the holistic aspect of that person and truly build a relationship.”
While frustration is mounting with a sick-care system that merely reacts to rather than anticipates illness, Van Ham says DPC builds on a back-to-basics approach that helps prevent problems from occurring and can stave off disease and chronic conditions. He says regular checkups and preventive screenings from doctors who are unencumbered by time constraints can help identify early-onset diseases and conditions before they become a financial concern and undermine quality of life.
Where medical stop-loss captives can help elevate the DPC model is the fact that employers in these arrangements have a vested interest in always wanting to ensure they’re improving clinical outcomes and lowering costs, according to Van Ham. “They’re purchasing stop-loss in a more efficient way, and they’re seeing the rewards and benefits of doing that on an ongoing basis,” he observes.
