Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Dear Dr. Price: 5 suggestions for the new Health and Human Services secretary

Congratulations on your confirmation ! That was easy, and now comes the hard part.

If I could speak with the new head of HHS I would tell him many things, however this writer covers most of it .

Suneel Dhand writes his message to Tom Price. on KevinMD's blog.

 "As a physician myself, it’s great to know that a fellow physician will head up the agency. I’m sure you understand too, having been a practicing orthopedic surgeon, how disheartening and frustrating it is to have non-clinical “experts” making key decisions about health care.
I’m sure you’ve also seen the news about how your nomination has divided the physician community. Nevertheless, you have the full support of many of our nation’s top physician organizations, including the American Medical Association.
I am all for physicians taking leadership positions in health care, industry and — yes — politics. Your resume is hugely impressive. I’m aware of many of your viewpoints. And in the interests of being completely honest, I am not in agreement with all of them — as I’m sure is the case for a large percentage of the over 800,000 physicians in the United States.
Especially if you ever propose changes that risk any of our long-suffering patients losing access or have the result of making health care more unaffordable for them. Having said that, I am glad about your consistent wish to put the “doctor-patient relationship” first. Nobody needs to tell you what has gone on over the last decade and how the practice of medicine has changed for the worse. We need to consider the following five points to make American Health Care Great Again:
1. The cost of our health care system is just unsustainable, as we’ve known for a very long time. 2. The frontline of medicine has been decimated by excessively onerous regulations.   3. Let’s keep our independent physicians.  4. Let’s foster a health care system that favors doctors (or nurses, or indeed any other health care professionals) in positions of leadership.  5. As you’ve already said time and again, we must always remember that it’s all about the patient and their doctor. This paradigm is central to all health care systems — true patient-centered care.   
As much as we need to improve, let’s also not forget all of the great things about American health care. We have the most amazing doctors and nurses and lead the world in innovation and research. We can maintain our high standards, while still giving our patients the best possible deal at much lower costs. We can also make our system a great one to work in for our hard-working doctors. This health care ship can still be reversed — especially by the collective efforts of those physicians who all started off with the same call to service and altruistic intentions that you probably did too.

Author:  Heath Train Express took several liberties in quoting his article for the sake of brevity.  The entire article is linked below.




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