As part of my family medicine residency training, I’m taking a month-long elective called Innovations in Primary Care. This month is an opportunity for primary care doctors from family medicine and internal medicine residency programs in Seattle to explore some of the different primary care models being trialed in the Seattle area and to use those experiences to fuel discussion about how primary care (and really, all medical care) can be improved in the United States.
Today was our first meeting, during which we gathered to collectively write an H&P for our current medical system. For those reading this who are not in medicine, the History and Physical or H&P is a semi-standardized note-writing structure that doctors use to describe the subjective and objective information about a patient’s health, assess why the patient is experiencing illness, and describe the next steps we need to take (diagnostic tests and/or treatments) going forward. It’s a structured way of thinking about a patient that helps us be rigorous and methodical.
It was a gratifying process because each of the doctors at the table shared a passion for making our health care system better, but brought a different set of experiences and priorities to the conversation.
Some of the take-aways I had from this conversation are as follows (in no particular order):
- The insurance framework for paying for health care, while originally conceived to improve access to surgical services which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to most people, was quickly recognized by doctors as a way to extract larger fees for patient care. After all, when a third party (the insurance company) pays the bills, people tolerate much higher fees even if the end result is steady rise in out-of-pocket costs for everyone. Doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies have abused this system so greedily under the previous usual-and-customary payment system that increasingly rigid cost-containment measures have had to be implemented to control costs. We now live in a society where the average doctor makes $294,000 per year–more than 98.9% of Americans–while medical bills bankrupt patients and health insurance cost suppresses wage growth. Recognizing and holding ourselves accountable to how capitalism in medicine has brought out the worst in us is necessary before we can even begin to conceptualize a new system.
- The costs of most important and effective interventions to improve health, including primary care, are recurring and predictable costs that are best paid for through public health funding, NOT through health insurance. Access to clean water, nutritious food, safe housing, and preventive medical care is necessary for All People at All Times.
- America fails to invest in public welfare programs because of racism. The idea of the racialized-and-thus-undeserving Other benefiting from public welfare programs (e.g. the racist specter of the Welfare Queen that Reagan so infamously promoted) is fundamentally intolerable to White America. We are comfortable with 1 in 7 people in the United States facing food insecurity if it means we can prevent one person from buying steak with food stamps. There is no justice without racial justice.
- Many participants are needed to transform our medical care system into a true health care system. While there are only physicians in this particular group, the real work requires public health professionals, community health workers, housing experts, policy wonks, political activists, artists, chefs, personal trainers, behavioralists, and many others to both design an implement a better system.
I’m looking forward to the experiences and conversations this month will bring, and I hope to walk away with greater insight into how I can be a better advocate for effective and equitable health care in this country.
Toward Health 