"The Villages will build eight primary-care centers throughout its community, ensuring that it can meet the 10-minute golf cart ride litmus test."
/Nope, not from The Onion. That's from Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post, analyzing the Affordable Care Act and how The Villages--home to world record golf cart parades, STD's, a golf cart drill team--and the new standard for affordable care: golf cart ride distance.
The Villages will build eight primary-care centers throughout its community, ensuring that it can meet the 10-minute golf cart ride litmus test. Each will be staffed by eight doctors who will handle a panel of 1,250 patients. The doctors will all be paid by salary as employees of Villages Health, taking away some of the incentives for faster care that exist in a fee-for-service system.
Patients will still have access to hospitals, including the nearby hospital system run by the University of South Florida, although the whole idea is to make primary-care doctors the primary source of health care.
“This is putting primary care front and center,” Sussman says. “It’s making sure that the first call people make, except if they’re having something like terrible chest pains, that they would take the medical concern to their physician. If you have a terrible headache, instead of going to the ER, it’s saying ‘come here, and we’ll have you seen right away’.”