Getting Back to Primary Care

Learning Module 1- U.S. Healthcare System- Cheryl McGehee

The U.S. healthcare costs are the highest in the world according to one study but, our mortality rate is nothing to get excited about (Bates, 2010).  According to this article, countries that focus more on primary care, afforded to a majority of their population, have much better outcomes. Overall satisfaction with primary care physicians is low in the U. S. and steadily on the decrease (Bates, 2010). This means that we are quickly moving toward a specialist based system rather than primary.  One major reason given for this discrepancy in cost to outcome is the fact that primary care treats the patient as a whole, whereas a patient may have to see many different specialty physicians at once, if plagued with multiple chronic conditions. Another reason is that to be able to practice as a primary physician means doctors must keep up with more and more information, which is constantly changing and sometimes overwhelming, especially in a large, busy practice. These facts also make it unattractive for new medical students to make the decision to go into primary care. Some changes have already started, for instance, the Affordable Care Act has slated the primary payment schedule to increase by 10% (Bates, 2010). This may not be enough incentive to keep or attract new doctors to the field. Primary care could also potentially cut healthcare cost due to omission of duplicate testing and diagnostic procedures, initiated through our current process of multiple specialty physicians necessitating the delivery of their own unique treatments to an individual chronically ill patient (Bates, 2010). Adding to this every growing problem is the fact that the baby boomer generation is causing a shift in number of aging Americans, daily. Overall it would be beneficial for the U.S. to take a hard look at ways to support directing the physician care of our nation back to primary versus specialty care.

References

Bates, D. (2010). Primary care and the us health care system: What needs to change? Journal of General Internal Medicine, 25(10), 998-999. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11606-010-1464-0

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2955476/