Send a Letter to Your Congressional Representatives
Please put in your zip code and copy the letter below and send to your congressional representatives. If you have a personal story about how holistic medicine helped you please write a short story about that.
Copy this letter or write your own letter:
Executive Summary:
1. Re-emphasize primary care through increased compensation and expand definition to include all qualified healthcare professionals.
2. Provide compensation to PCPs for appropriate time spent with patients to educate, assess and perform preventative tasks.
3. Create incentives to attract qualified PCPs through student loan forgiveness programs
Resolving the healthcare crisis requires a re-emphasis on primary care. We need to expand the concept of primary care provider to include not just MDs and Nurse Practitioners but various qualified professionals, including holistic medical practitioners, nurses, naturopathic physicians, physicians’ assistants, family-practice doctors, general internists, pediatricians, and gynecologists. As most chronic disease can be prevented through educational means, these PCPs must be given appropriate compensation for the time necessary to do this education. Studies have shown that most doctors need at least 45 minutes to perform the twenty-five basic functions that the US Prevention Task Force Services recommends for disease prevention. Greater face-to-face time between PCP and patient to discuss food choices, exercise, sleep, counseling will lead to better outcomes and a reduction in costs due to decreased dependence on expensive interventions such as surgery and pharmaceuticals.
At this time, PCPs feel rushed and only have time to fill prescriptions that may relieve symptoms but mask the real cause of the disease. Furthermore, patients are only reimbursed for up to one prevention visit per year on most insurance plans with some plans at younger ages only allowing one every three years. This is woefully inadequate. Real preventative medicine requires patients to visit the doctor before they get sick. This may sound obvious but the entire system is geared towards visiting the doctor after one is sick.
Furthermore, as medical training has become more expensive, students opt to become specialists instead of PCPs. The United States currently has a shortage of PCPs and that shortage is becoming larger. To reverse this trend, programs should be created to attract PCPs. Besides expanding the definition of a PCP, loan repayment programs, deferred loans and other financial incentives should be created for new doctors to perform PCP functions.
In summary, expanding the definition of a PCP and creating programs to encourage people to become PCPs coupled with PCPs having the time to better counsel, educate and treat patients will lead to a reduction in chronic disease and a healthier America.