I'm a physician. I moved my family of 4 away from conventional health insurance, and I have no regrets.

Dr. Ben Hagopian sees patients through Direct Primary Care. He also made the switch for his family of four, pairing DPC with a medical cost-sharing group. Courtesy of Ben Hagopian.

• I've been a doctor for more than a decade and have a family of four.

• I've replaced traditional health insurance with direct primary care and a medical cost-sharing group.

• For the first time, I feel like I truly control our healthcare.

For more than 10 years, I have worked inside the maze of American healthcare. I've worn the white coat, taken overnight call, signed charts, and treated thousands of patients.

After years of that experience, I reached a point where I could no longer support a system that seemed built to disappoint the very people it was supposed to help.

My family and I are no longer insured in the traditional way, and I believe it is the best financial and medical choice I have ever made.

I reached my limit

For years, I practiced primary care in a traditional, insurance-driven setting. My days were filled with 15-minute visits shaped less by medical need than by billing rules and reimbursement codes. I felt fully at the mercy of corporate medicine. Patients often waited months to see me and rarely got as much time as they needed.

It felt as though insurance companies were the unseen third party in every exam room, deciding what tests I could order and which medications my patients could receive. I was no longer only a doctor; I was also doing data entry for massive payers. That led to a deep burnout that followed me home every night.

Meanwhile, some of my patients skipped needed care because the price was simply too high. Did it make sense to spend $300 on a thyroid test just to confirm that a $10-a-month medication was working properly? Many people, understandably, chose to spend their money elsewhere.

I knew I needed to leave, not only for my own well-being, but also to practice medicine the way I believed it should be done.

Direct primary care offered a different path

I eventually left the conventional model for Direct Primary Care, or DPC. Under this arrangement, patients — or sometimes employers or an insurance company — pay me a flat monthly membership fee of around $100. It is affordable, and my current patient panel includes attorneys, electricians, teachers, and retirees. There are no copays, no deductibles, and, most importantly, no insurance companies hovering over every decision.

I made the same change at home

Once I saw how much better medicine could work without traditional insurance interference, I took the next step. I removed my wife and children, now 9 and 6, from our health insurance plan.

Instead, we joined a medical cost-sharing community. It is not insurance; it is a group of members who help cover one another's large, unexpected medical bills. By combining DPC for routine care with health sharing for major expenses, I found a better way to protect my family while paying much less.

The numbers supported the choice

Childbirth makes the cost difference clear. When our first child was born under a high-end traditional insurance plan, we still owed about $10,000 after paying premiums. We were effectively paying twice: once for the coverage and again for the care. My wife spent hours of her maternity leave arguing with insurance companies about the services we received in the hospital. A few months later, when our infant son was hospitalized, she was back on the phone fighting for coverage during a family crisis. It took years to pay off the birth and his illness.

When our second child arrived, we looked at the situation through the lens of a cost-sharing plan. On a plan like ours, the Initial Unshareable Amount, or IUA, the portion we pay before the community helps, was only $1,500.

After that $1,500, the community covered the rest. We did not have to spend my wife's recovery time battling a claims adjuster or waiting for pre-approvals. We knew exactly what we were responsible for, and more importantly, we knew our family was protected by a community rather than a corporation.

I feel I took back control

As a physician, I've seen the insurance trap from both sides. We are taught to believe that without a blue or green plastic card in our wallets, we are not safe.

The truth is that for some people, traditional insurance has become a barrier to care rather than a bridge to it. By opting out and combining Direct Primary Care with a health share, I have regained my time as a doctor and my peace of mind as a father. I am no longer waiting for an insurance company to decide how I should care for my children or my patients. As both a doctor and a father, I feel secure for the first time in my career.