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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Caregiving, Consumer Health Care, Coverage Policy, Insurance, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.