Funding Healthy Society Helps Cure Health Care

...Real-life obstacles had an enormous impact on my patient's lives, but because I had neither the skills nor the resources for treating them, I ignored the social context of disease altogether. And so, despite being a physician, I was surprised when, in June, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced that $250 million originally designated for dealing with the social issues that cause problems like Jeremy's would instead be used to train more primary-care doctors.

Given dramatic and worsening shortages in the primary-care medical workforce, these efforts to increase access are laudable. But if we think that increasing access to doctors will solve America's health care problems, we will have not only missed the rescue boat but also put holes in the raft we jumped on.

Because the Obama administration is not likely to find more money in the midst of the recession, we need to train these new doctors to deal with the problems we seen in the clinic. There are several important reasons that this new workforce - and the old one - should increase its skills to tackle the social factors that affect health...

 

Editors Take: This is one of the most important articles we have come across in quite some time. It raises the issues of social factors, such as widespread poverty and malnutrition in the US, that have a direct impact on people's health. Highly recommended. [RAM]