Medical Homes A Must
January 7th, 2009
Note: While Disruptive Women in Healthcare is designed as a platform for women to present their ideas and concerns on today’s health issues, we occasionally allow posts from men who we feel will add to the discussion. This guest post is from Peter Pitts, the President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest:
“President Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas.”
Says who? The New York Times. (Ergo, it must be true.) The article, “Expansion of Clinics Shapes a Bush Legacy.” All the news that’s fit to print? Well almost. It’s pretty amazing that the Gray Lady opted to leave out any mention of Part D in the President’s legacy. But maybe that article’s on the way.
But to give credit where credit is do, it’s a good article that raises some important questions — one of the most important raised by House majority whip Representative James E. Clyburn (D, SC). Mr. Clyburn makes the very important point that reducing the number of uninsured will be meaningless if the newly insured cannot find medical homes.
This is a key policy point for many reasons, not the least of which is the successful management of chronic disease. Minus a warm and welcoming (and e-tized) medical home, we cannot seriously advance prevention initiatives (i.e., early detection) or improve our abysmal compliance/adherence rates. Minus a medical home we remain an acute care culture. Minus a medical home, even community health centers are but Potemkin villages.
Last year over 80,000 Americans had a foot amputated because of undiagnosed and untreated diabetes. Hundreds of thousands of heart attacks and strokes, caused by undiagnosed or untreated high blood pressure and high cholesterol, cost the American health care system billions of dollars a year while the cost in terms of human suffering cannot even begin to be measured.
Lack of early detection? Sure. Lack of compliance/adherence? Definitely. Lack of a medical home? Shameful.
When it comes to healthcare reform, we cannot leave patients home alone.
*****
Peter Pitts is President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a think tank on public health care policy issues and Senior Vice President, Director for Global Health Affairs for Manning Selvage & Lee. From 2002-2004 Peter was FDA’s Associate Commissioner for External Relations, serving as senior communications and policy adviser to the Commissioner. He supervised FDA’s Office of Public Affairs, Office of the Ombudsman, Office of Special Health Issues, Office of Executive Secretariat, and Advisory Committee Oversight and Management. He served on the agency’s obesity working group and counterfeit drug taskforce and remains a Special Government Employee (SGE) consultant to the FDA.
His book, Become Strategic or Die, is widely recognized as a cutting edge study of how leadership, in order to be successful over the long term, must be combined with strategic vision and ethical practice. He is the editor of the new book, Coincidence or Crisis, a discussion of global prescription medicine counterfeiting.
He has served as an adjunct professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and Butler University. A graduate of McGill University, he is married to Jane Mogel, and has two sons.
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January 7th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Hmm, not exactly sure if having Peter Pitts as a guest counts as the Center for Medicine in bi Pharma’s interst is about as disruptive to the current special interests who run healthcare as breeze on warm summer day. (And he’s not female) But there are two basic misconceptions in his piece–and I meant to write about it when I read the NY Times crackpot piece
a) the biggest problem for the uninsured is not their lack of access to care (although that is a huge problem), it’s that they and the under-insured get financially crippled when they do get care. Jon Cohn’s Sick is full of examples. Pitts saying that “we shouldnt remove uninsurance until we have medical homes for all is utter crap” and the new cry from those who want to stop real reform.
b) Praising Bush for creating new FQHCs is essentially like praising George Wallace/Pik Botha (insert your favorite segregationist here) for building more drinking fountains or schools “for coloreds-only” and then saying “look what we’ve done to help them”. A real leader would have provided access for the poor to the healthcare system the rest of Americans enjoy, not said let’s build a few more separate and not really equal facilities.
And part D a legacy? Well to the short term profits of the companies Pitts flacks for, I guess it was. But those CEOs are all retired now and the next Administration will have to sort it out.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Matt is certainly entitled to his opinion about me. (I guess it’s true that “you’re nobody until somebody hates you.”) But he didn’t actually have anything to say about my post. Matt — what are your views on the issue of “medical homes?” (Also, Matt is right — I am not female. But I am married to one and, gee — some of my best friends are female!)