Dr. Rasheeda Hall didn’t want to cut her patients’ appointments off after the allotted 15 minutes, but she didn’t have much of a choice.
Working as a family physician at a hospital and clinics in southeastern Mississippi, Hall said she watched as her patients were rushed through visits, sometimes giving her as little as five minutes to diagnose conditions, educate her patients, discuss treatment plans and write prescriptions. She tried setting timers on her phone and asked nurses to knock on the exam room door when her time was up, but she kept running over.
Insurance companies’ billing practices influenced the amount of time she was able to spend with patients and the care she could provide to them. Neither she nor her patients were getting what they needed.
“I just started realizing there has got to be a better way,” she said.
Hall opened Hall Health in Hattiesburg in 2024. The clinic uses the direct primary care model, a type of practice that does not accept insurance and instead provides a slate of primary care services to patients who pay a monthly subscription fee. Hall schedules appointments for 30 or 60 minutes, doubling or quadrupling the time she has to spend with patients.
Dr. Rasheeda Hall talks about how she encourages her patients to exercise to help combat some health-related issues at her clinic, Hall Health, Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, in Hattiesburg. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
The model is growing in popularity nationwide, including in Mississippi. This approach to care typically gives patients direct access to their doctors, unlimited in-person and telehealth visits and longer appointments. On average, direct primary care practices charge roughly $100 per member each month, according to a 2024 survey of over 450 practices across the United States published in July by the Direct Primary Care Alliance, a membership organization for providers.
Hall said she has seen a “big uptick” in patients who sought out her practice this year because they are struggling to afford the cost of health insurance after the expiration of enhanced federal tax credits for Affordable Care Act marketplace plans in December. Mississippi has seen one of the steepest drops nationally in coverage rates after the subsidies ended, and health policy experts expect uninsurance rates in the state to rise.
Some doctors and patients say that direct primary care allows doctors to provide higher quality, preventive care to their patients and avoid costly hospitalizations. They argue it avoids the drawbacks of insurance incentives and can make primary care services more affordable for patients. But some health policy experts warn the model is not a substitute for insurance, disproportionately serves higher-income patients and could worsen primary care physician shortages.
The Mississippi Direct Primary Care Act, passed by the state Legislature in 2015, requires doctors to establish in signed agreements outlining the scope of their services and fees that direct primary care memberships are not insurance. The law also prohibits physicians from refusing to serve patients because of preexisting conditions.
About 1 in 5 of Hall’s patients are uninsured. Hall works to help them find affordable healthcare services by offering labs at wholesale rates, connecting them with financial assistance programs and helping them find the best rates for services outside of her scope. But she said she makes it clear to patients that direct primary care does not replace insurance, because it does not cover specialty or emergency medical services.
Sharon Conner has been a patient of Dr. Ashlee Hendry at Mid-South Direct Primary Care in Petal for about a year. A former nurse, truck driver and beautician, Conner is disabled and unable to work after a workplace injury. She lives on a limited income and does not have health insurance.
Conner said the ability to schedule same or next-day appointments with her doctor, along with being able to text her questions about her care, has allowed her to continue receiving quality primary care and maintain her health without insurance. She hopes to qualify for Medicaid coverage but says she will continue to pay to see Hendry if she does because of the high-quality care she provides, and believes the cost is fair. Hendry has also helped Conner navigate disability and food benefit applications and connected her with affordable diagnostic testing.
“She is the advocate that I want by my side,” Conner said.
‘An assembly line’
Hendry opened her direct primary care clinic in 2022 and now operates two locations, in Petal and Hattiesburg. Like Hall, she said she had grown disillusioned with a medical system she felt prioritized moving patients through quickly and micromanaging providers over giving doctors the time and discretion needed to provide meaningful care.
Dr. Ashlee Hendry discusses prior authorization policies and the differences between self-pay and insurance prices for health care at her clinic, Mid-South Direct Primary Care, Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, in Hattiesburg. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
At her first job working at an outpatient primary care clinic for a Memphis-based hospital system, Hendry said she saw more than 30 patients a day.
“What I learned there was that medicine has kind of evolved into an assembly line and the name of the game there was to see as many patients as you can,” she said. “I wasn’t sleeping at night wondering what was missed.”
After three years, Hendry took a job at a Hattiesburg hospital. There, she found the churn of a similar “referral machine.” She began to look closely at how patients were being billed for services. Her interest in price transparency in medicine developed while she was in medical school and struggled financially as a single mother of a toddler.
She noticed that patients were sometimes charged for lab tests the hospital did not fulfill and billing codes were adjusted after visits, causing patients to be charged more for services. She said she raised her concerns, but when the hospital’s management did not rectify the issues, she left her position, successfully exiting a restrictive non-compete agreement.
Hendry seized the opportunity to open her own direct primary care practice. She found an affordable space to rent, and her husband, who works in construction, helped her flip the space in 30 days. In the first 24 hours after she announced its opening, 100 patients signed up.
Since then, Hendry said word of the clinic has spread rapidly, especially among patients struggling to afford health insurance. She now has a waitlist for new patients. About half of her patients have insurance, though she does not accept insurance for the services she provides. Patients can, however, use their insurance to cover lab work or other health care services.
“We have so many patients reaching out: ‘Hey, I just lost my insurance. My premium went up $500 a month, I literally cannot afford it,’” she said.
More time and transparency
Having more time with patients allows her to better understand the health disparities they face, Hall said. Most of her patients are middle-aged Black women, many of whom, she said, have previously not received the care and attention from healthcare providers they deserve.
She often begins appointments with a simple question: “How are you doing?”
“I look them in their eyes, and they start crying,” Hall said. “Because nobody has taken the time to stop and actually care to hear the response.”
Extra time and lower caseloads can also give direct primary care physicians the ability to offer more high-quality care for their patients.
Dr. Rasheeda Hall’s clinic, Hall Health, pictured here on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, is located in the 500 block of West Laurel Avenue in Hattiesburg. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Hendry said she now sees no more than 12 patients a day, even at her busiest. The additional time allows her to take a deeper look at patients’ medical histories and research difficult or unusual cases. In one case, extensive research, including joining rare disease support groups and seeking out genetic testing for a patient, helped her diagnose a rare autoimmune disorder. In another case, she noticed a pattern in a patient’s past lab results that led her to identify the warning signs of leukemia, a trend she said other providers had previously missed.
Hendry also takes time to call around to specialists to seek out the lowest prices for her patients. She has recorded some of these calls in viral videos reaching millions of views on social media. By asking questions about prices, she said she has discovered some hospitals charge out-of-pocket prices for services that are lower than for some patients with insurance coverage.
Her videos have prompted strong responses from viewers with insurance, she said, who expressed surprise at the out-of-pocket costs for some services and the variability in cost based on the type of insurance coverage a patient has.
Dr. Ashlee Hendry discusses prior authorization policies and the differences between self-pay and insurance prices for health care at her clinic, Mid-South Direct Primary Care, Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, in Hattiesburg. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
“The insanity that a medical doctor is calling to negotiate pricing like a dang used car sale deal,” one commenter wrote in response to Hendry calling imaging centers and hospitals for out-of-pocket MRI costs.
After one of her videos went viral, Hendry said her office received a call from a hospital asking her to stop telling patients about out-of-pocket prices.
“It’s not the self-pay patients that are surprised,” Hendry said. “It’s the ones who have been insured for their entire life who have never seen what the real price of things are that are shocked and mad.”
Kellie Harper of Beaumont has health insurance, but she said as a patient of Hendry’s, she has learned more about how to ask questions about medical costs in order to find the most affordable care for her family.
“I ask about self-pay services before I give my insurance information to anybody,” Harper said.
Seeking a solution
Dr. Robert Berenson, an institute fellow at Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank The Urban Institute, previously oversaw Medicare payment policy for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He practiced primary care for over a decade before turning to policy. He said he sympathizes with doctors who feel as if they are “on a treadmill,” but does not believe direct primary care is a solution to the broader, more complex problem of companies profiting from providing healthcare services and low insurance payments for primary care services.
“It puts off the day of reckoning,” he said. “What are we going to do to try to save primary care?”
The model is not a solution, he said, because it exacerbates physician shortages by reducing the number of patients a doctor is able to serve.
But some direct primary care physicians argue this is faulty logic, because primary care physicians experiencing burnout might instead decide to leave the field entirely. Almost half of primary care physicians reported feeling burnout in 2023, according to a 2025 report from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.
Direct primary care is not the solution to all of healthcare’s complex problems, but it can play a role in keeping talented physicians in the healthcare field, said Dr. John Vanderloo, the past president of the Mississippi Academy of Family Physicians and first direct primary care physician to serve in that role.
“It’s not the end all be all, but it is, I think, renewing the spirit of the physician who is burned out,” he said.
Berenson said he also has concerns that some proponents of direct primary care overstate what primary care practices can provide. Patients without insurance could face significant financial risks if they are diagnosed with cancer or another serious condition, or require emergency care or costly medications, he said.
“We have to have major reforms in the insurance industry, but I don’t think you can take care of patients by yourself,” Berenson said. “Those days are done.”
Primary care doctors, too, acknowledge the model isn’t affordable for every patient. Hendry, who charges $100 a month per adult, said the cost is the one aspect of the model that bothers her.
Hall said she hopes to create a nonprofit arm of her practice to provide lower-cost care to patients through the direct primary care model. But she said her practice cannot alone serve as the solution to all of the challenges facing medicine.
“I’m one person, and I can’t fix all of healthcare’s problems,” Hall said.
