Wisconsin Primary Care Waits Averaged 33 Days in Secret-Shopper Calls

A reader in Kenosha told Wisconsin Watch that her partner, after several fainting episodes, learned the next neurology opening was in June 2027. Another reader, in Auburn, worries his wife won’t live to see the neurologist he booked 14 months out.

Those are specialist waits. The more useful numbers in the October 30 piece by Natalie Yahr are about primary care, and they cut the other way from what you might expect.

What the calls found

The data come from 3Dhealth, a Chicago consulting company that helps health systems decide how many doctors to recruit. Since 2012 the firm has called doctors’ offices inside its client systems, posing as new patients, and recorded what happened.

From 2012 to 2024 the firm made more than 8,000 calls to Wisconsin physician offices, covering 62 specialties across eight health systems, Wisconsin Watch reports. About 7% of calls went unanswered. Of the offices callers reached, about 15% were closed to new patients.

Offices that were open had an average wait of 33 days. Half the waits ran 21 days or longer. One in 10 ran past 75 days.

Then the split. Primary care offices had a shorter average wait than specialists, 33 days against 42, but they were more likely to be closed to new patients: roughly 24% against 11%.

So the front door of the system is locked more often than the rooms behind it. A specialist makes you wait. A primary care office, about one time in four, won’t book you at all.

The 2024 round covered just two systems, one mostly rural and one urban. The rural system had longer median waits, 27 days to 22, and was closed to new patients more often, about 17% to 11%. Rural offices that turned callers away were also less than half as likely to suggest an alternative unless the caller asked.

“All of that has been getting worse in general across the country, especially over the past five years since COVID,” 3Dhealth president and CEO Ron Flower told Wisconsin Watch.

The option on the list

Most of the advice in the piece works inside the system. Ask follow-up questions. Get on a waitlist. Check whether a family member’s doctor will take you. Try another clinic in the same system, or a nurse practitioner or physician assistant.

Near the end, Wisconsin Watch adds one that works outside it. Patients who want prompter primary care “can consider purchasing a membership at one of the growing number of ‘direct primary care’ practices,” it says, where patients pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to certain primary care services “with no health insurance involved.” It adds that some parts of Wisconsin “now have several direct primary care practices,” while “other parts may have few or none.”

That last clause carries a lot of weight. The rural system in 3Dhealth’s data had the longer waits and the more closed doors. If DPC is thinnest in the same places, the fix is least available where the wait is worst.

What the option looks like in practice

A new practice in Missouri, profiled the same day, shows the trade a patient is being offered. Internist Dr. Hilary Bensinger opened her office in Town and Country, in St. Louis County, in September, Ladue News reports. She left a large health system that she says “started micromanaging and controlling patient encounters.”

Patients pay $2,500 for a year, which covers unlimited office visits and 24/7 access for urgent issues, according to the profile. First appointments run 90 minutes. She doesn’t take insurance. She shares an office and staff with another DPC physician, offers in-office labs, a limited pharmacy and EKGs, and has a Labcorp agreement for discounted testing.

Two details show how loose the vocabulary still is. Ladue News calls the model “direct primary care, also known as concierge medicine.” Bensinger’s own site calls it concierge medicine and asks patients to contact her for pricing. The American Academy of Family Physicians treats them as different models: it says concierge medicine “often charges higher annual fees” and “may bill insurance for covered services,” and that DPC membership fees “typically range from $50 to $100” a month.

Bensinger’s $2,500 works out to about $208 a month, above that typical range. Prices vary by practice and market, and hers buys a no-insurance model with long visits. But a Wisconsin patient reading “direct primary care” as the way around a 33-day wait might find anything from a $50 membership to a concierge-priced one under the same label.

The open question

The 3Dhealth numbers measure the insurance-based system. They can’t say how long a new patient waits at a Wisconsin DPC practice, because the firm calls only offices inside its client health systems.

One directory that Wisconsin Watch linked lists 86 direct primary care and concierge practices across 54 cities in Wisconsin. No source in the reporting maps those practices against the rural areas where the closed-door rate was highest. Some listings are marked “Taking new patients.” That label is not a measured wait.

You might reasonably assume a DPC practice books faster, since smaller panels are the point of the model. The AAFP reports an average DPC panel of 504 patients in 2025, up from 402 in 2024. None of the reporting cited here measures whether that turns into a short wait for a new patient in rural Wisconsin. Until someone makes the same calls to DPC offices, the claim that membership medicine fixes the access problem rests on how the model is designed.