The Million Dollar Question: What does the top tier of U.S. concierge medicine actually cost per year?
The Million Dollar Question this Friday:
What does the highest-tier U.S. concierge medicine practice — the family-office-style firm serving San Francisco, New York, and Miami — charge per adult patient per year?
A) $4,000 B) $15,000 C) $40,000 D) $100,000
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Most people guess somewhere in the $10,000–$15,000 range — high enough to sound exclusive, low enough to still sound like “a nice membership.” The actual answer is C) $40,000, and the gap between that guess and the real number is the whole story about what “concierge medicine” actually means.
Per CNBC’s 2024 profile of Private Medical, the San Francisco–founded practice that now serves New York and Miami as well, the firm charges approximately $40,000 per adult patient and $25,000 per patient under 18 each year — covering office visits, tests, and procedures, though not hospitalization. Founder Dr. Jordan Shlain describes the model explicitly as “a full-service, family office for health and medicine,” with a team of physicians, nurses, and clinical staff who know a family’s entire medical history and handle everything from routine visits to second opinions on complex cases. The firm reportedly serves more than 1,000 families.
The mechanism is that “concierge medicine” is not one product at one price — it’s four different products sharing a label. The entry tier, through networks like MDVIP, runs $1,800 to $5,000 a year and is mostly older households keeping a trusted family doctor who “went concierge.” The 24/7 private-ER tier, through firms like Sollis Health, starts around $4,000 and runs past $12,000. Private Medical sits at the top because it isn’t selling faster appointments — it’s selling a clinical team on permanent retainer, the medical equivalent of a single-family office.
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This question is treated in full in Concierge Medicine: Health Care for the Wealthy, which walks through all four tiers of the price ladder and who actually buys each one.
If you have a Million Dollar Question you’d like to see treated in a future Friday email, send it to [email protected].
— Logan Pierce
Editor, How Millionaires Live
