Physicians Should Lead on Healthcare Reform

By KEN TERRY (This is the first in a series of excerpts from Terry’s new book, Physician-Led Healthcare Reform: a New Approach to Medicare for All, published by the American Association for Physician Leadership.) Even before COVID-19, healthcare reform seemed to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, but there is a rational way forward. This approach, which I call “physician-led healthcare reform,” would engage doctors in building a healthcare system that was safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable, to use the Institute of Medicine’s set of foundational goals in its landmark book, Crossing the Quality Chasm: a New Health System for the 21st Century.Primary care physicians, rather than hospitals, would be in charge of the system, and they’d work closely with specialists and other healthcare professionals to produce the best patient outcomes at the lowest cost. It would take a decade or more to restructure the healthcare system so that this goal could be achieved. Similarly, the transition to a single-payer insurance system needs to be accomplished gradually—although the pandemic might accelerate that timetable. Most people are not yet ready to abandon employer-sponsored insurance, and there’s still a lot of distrust of the government. Providers are more likely to accept changes in how they’re paid over time than all of a sudden. Additional benefits can also be brought online slowly. Ideally, we could transform healthc...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy healthcare reform Ken Terry Medicare For All Source Type: blogs