Entry Two

This week I spent learning about the different routes of creating policy changed through the complicated world of New York City, New York State and National politics. I attended a few key meetings, all relating to widening access to healthcare, but each involved a different group. One valuable experiences was a luncheon at the Century Foundation where Arnold Relman, an emeritus professor from Harvard Medical school, presented an overview on his new book. Relman, basically the most well-known and the original advocate for a single-payer health care system, held an interesting view that not only the insurance side of the medical industry needs to be completely redone, but that the medical delivery system itself must be revamped! Relman, who is a Doctor, was calling out to fellow physicians to reorganize into multi-speciality practices which pay salaries instead of fee for service so that more and more doctors would return to focusing on providing primary care instead of entering lucrative but unavailable speciality fields. This take was completely new to me, and caused me to have to reevaluate the way I had begun to organize my own views on what reforms were necessary in order to make health care available to all Americans. I had not gone so far as to question the direction of the whole field of medicine, which I one day hope to enter, but can see now that it is an idea that is worthy of serious examination as America is fast becoming a nation where it is nearly impossible to recruit medical students to enter primary care fields. This trend makes it harder and harder for lower-income and especially the uninsured to even see a doctor until it is either too late, or they end up at the ER in an emergency situation, when a simple and basic yearly check up could have prevented the whole illness.