The big story today, cover of the WSJ and The NY Times, is that the administration is losing public support for health care reform. Of course they are.
Up until let’s say a year ago, for the most part, other than an occasional report on rising costs or a story of some particularly bad case of someone being wronged by the system, most of us, the patients, just cruised along griping about waiting at the doctor’s office or how much things cost, but generally feeling like we were getting good care and there was nothing we could do about the other stuff.
Now the cat’s out of the bag. We have been inundated for months with all kinds of details about how health care works: doctors get paid to order tests - not to keep people healthy, we get treatments that are unproven and expensive, doctors and patients don’t communicate and worse. We understand the relationship between health care costs and businesses closing. We understand that working people lose their insurance coverage every day. We hear that other countries insure everyone, health care costs less and people live longer.
Patients have been empowered with information, and guess what, we want answers. It turns out that when someone takes the time to engage the patient, we understand pretty well. Is it possible they weren’t counting on that?
How can the administration get the people back on board?
By assuring them that they will be heard. By making sure that their voice is hard wired into the billions dollars that doctors will be paid to utilize HIT technology. By promising, and then making good on that promise by writing it into the bill, that the definition of meaningful use of an EMR, the definition of quality, requires the ability for the patient to input clinically significant data about the care they're receiving, and their understanding and their input into their treatment plan, directly into their medical record. By insisting, and paying for this data to be collected, analyzed and acted on to improve therapeutic partnerships between patients and caregivers.
Hardwire the patient - the voter, the employee, the premium payer - into health care reform and they will give their support even if it hurts a little.
Bill Fox, JD, MA
Executive Director
CPIR
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