The Primary Care Myth: Why Better Access Won't Fix Rising Healthcare Costs

For years, the standard answer to rising costs and poor health has been more primary care access. Get everyone a doctor, and the rest of the plan takes care of itself. Garner's claims data suggests that view misses most of the picture. Having a primary care doctor helps. Having a good one matters about five times more.

In this session, Kirk Czonstka, Garner's SVP of Strategic Alliances, and Nick Reber, Garner's founder and CEO, put numbers on that gap. You'll hear how hospitalization rates for asthma and COPD patients change with a top-quartile primary care doctor versus no doctor at all, why a carrier's tier-one designation says little about how a physician actually performs, and why mandatory annual physicals come out roughly neutral for most commercial populations. Nick also explains why carrier directories can be used to book an appointment only about a quarter of the time, and how that makes access look worse than it really is.

The Q&A covers telemedicine, hospital-owned primary care practices, and what it takes to get members to switch doctors. Anyone building a primary care strategy for 2026 will leave with a better question than how many doctors are in the network.