After working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for nine years, Dr. Marc Patterson decided to change his life. In 2001, he moved to New York City to take a job as chief of pediatric neurology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH).

This year, Patterson returned to the Big House on the Prairie. “Sometimes I miss New York,” he acknowledges, “but working in a system that actually functions is worth it.”

Let me be clear: Patterson has many good things to say about NYPH and Columbia University Medical Center, the uptown campus where the worked.  “I had a great experience, and fabulous colleagues,” Patterson told me. “Moreover, one of the reasons I moved back to Minnesota is because my family is there.”

Nevertheless, Patterson says: “There is a fundamental systemic difference between Columbia and the Mayo Clinic: Columbia is a traditional academic medical center;  [research] that came through the med school provided the money to pay us.  The hospital is a separate entity.  By contrast, at Mayo, the hospital and the medical school are one. It’s an integrated organization.”

What difference does that make?

Patients Trump Research

“At Mayo the focus is on the patient. The needs of the patient come first.  I think one of the Mayo brothers originally said it—and here, that really is the case,” says Patterson. “We also do high quality research at Mayo, and we have a graduate school of medicine.  But research is not the primary focus.

“At most academic medical centers,” he continues, “medical research comes first; education of the students comes second. Clinical practice [caring for patients in the hospital and clinics] is not the priority.”

This isn’t to say that doctors at Columbia don’t strive to give patients the very best care possible. I am a long-time New Yorker, and if I were going to be hospitalized in Manhattan, I might well choose Columbia.

But, at Columbia, “while being an excellent clinician is great, it’s just not as highly regarded as being a brilliant researcher,” Patterson explains. “Here at Mayo, being a superb clinician is the sine qua none—if you’re not able to practice at the highest level, you won’t succeed here.”

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       Over at Managed Care Matters( http://www.joepaduda.com/), Joe Paduda writes about how we might begin reforming healthcare—despite the economic meltdown. 

   First, he warns: “Comprehensive health reform will not happen in the near future. There is no money. There are lots of other priorities – financial stability, huge and growing deficits, energy, wars in two countries, nuclear proliferation and tax policy. There’s just no money, and not much bandwidth. Yet the Democrats will be highly motivated to do something meaningful, pressured by campaign promises and voter demands.”

      His recommendation: “Congress could pass and the President could sign legislation prohibiting medical underwriting in the individual market, requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions, mandating community rating, and establishing a basic benefits plan. “

       This would mean that private insurers would be forced to  offer insurance to all customers in a given community at the same price—despite pre-existing conditions. Insurers  no longer would be able to shun the stick, or gouge them by charging exorbitant premiums.  And, if we establish a basic benefit plan insurers would no longer be able to sell “Swiss Cheese” policies filled with holes.

Admittedly, this would mean that premiums would be higher for everyone in states where the sick are no longer closed out of the pool.  Today, premiums are significantly lower in California than in New York State because insurers in California are allowed to deny coverage to the ill. Sometimes they simply terminate a customer’s insurance when he or she becomes ill.

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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier America has just released a report that reveals the degree to which a child’s health is determined by the hand he draws when he is born.

The report, which is titled “America’s Health Starts With Healthy Children: How Do States Compare?” confirms what we have written in other Health Beat posts.

While having or not having health insurance is important, poverty will have an even greater influence on an individual’s health. As Commission Co-Chair and former Congressional Budget Office director Alice M. Rivlin puts it, “This report shows us just how much a child’s health is shaped by the environment in which he or she lives.”

Moreover, the report reveals that it is not only the poor who are molded by their environment. “In nearly every state, children in middle-income families also experience shortfalls in health when compared with those in higher income families. And these differences in children’s health by income can be seen across racial or ethnic groups”  says the report, which is based on  research  done at the University of California at San Francisco’s Center on Social Disparities in Health. Ultimately, this study highlights “the unrealized health potential possible if all children had the same opportunities for health as those in the best-off families.”

“Most of our efforts to improve health have focused on improving quality, access to and affordability of care. While these are important, support for better health that is associated with resources and community matters as well,” says Commission Co-Chair Mark McClellan. “As a nation, we clearly need to do better…a large body of research shows that the causes [of poor health among children] are complex,” the report observes, “and that medical care interventions are important but not sufficient.”

To illustrate “the magnitude of the link between education and health” the Commission also is releasing a new online tool that lets viewers see the connection first hand, says Dr Steven Woolf, a professor of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth who was involved in developing the tool. (Readers who want to check the relationship between education and premature deaths in their state or country will find the tool here).

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I have to admit I often have found the language of healthcare “rights” off-putting.  Yet the idea of healthcare as a “right” is usually pitted against the idea of healthcare as a “privilege.” Given that choice, I’ll circle “right” every time.

Still, when people claim something as a “right,” they often sound shrill and demanding. Then someone comes along to remind us that people who have “rights” also have “responsibilities,” and the next thing you know, we’re off and running in the debate about healthcare as a “right” vs. healthcare as a matter of “individual responsibility.”      

As regular readers know, I believe that when would-be reformers emphasize “individual responsibilities,” they shift the burden to the poorest and sickest among us. The numbers are irrefutable: low-income people are far more likely than other Americans to become obese, smoke, drink to excess and abuse drugs,  in part because a healthy lifestyle is  expensive, and in part because the stress of being poor—and “having little control over your life”—leads many to self-medicate. (For evidence and the full argument, see this recent post).  This is a major reason why the poor are sicker than the rest of us, and die prematurely of treatable conditions.

Those conservatives and libertarians who put such emphasis on “individual responsibility” are saying, in effect, that low-income families should learn to take care of themselves.

At the same time I’m not entirely happy making the argument that the poor have a “right” to expect society to take care of them. It only reinforces the conservative image (so artfully drawn by President Reagan) of an aggrieved, resentful mob of freeloaders dunning the rest of us for having the simple good luck of being relatively healthy and relatively wealthy. “We didn’t make them poor,” libertarians say. “Why should they have the ‘right’ to demand so much from us?”  Put simply, the language of “rights” doesn’t seem the best way to build solidarity.  And I believe that social solidarity is key to improving public health.

Given my unease with the language of rights, I was intrigued by a recent post by Shadowfax, an Emergency Department doctor from the Pacific Northwest who writes a blog titled “Movin Meat.”  (Many thanks to Kevin M.D. for calling my attention to this post.)  Shadowfax believes in universal healthcare.  Nevertheless, he argues that healthcare is not a “right,” but rather a “moral responsibility for an industrialized country.”   

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Healthcare reformers talk of a day when every American will have a “medical home.”   But as I noted in part I of this post (“Americans Who Have Insurance—But Still No Access to Care”), it is not at all clear who will be “at home” in these homes.

While health policy wonks envision a legion of 21st century Marcus Welbys who know their patients, consult with their specialists, send out timely reminders, and keep a meticulous record of their medical histories, the truth is that we’re facing a severe shortage of primary care physicians (PCPs). A recent study of 1,200 fourth-year students published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that only 2 percent planned to work in primary care. In a similar study in 1990, the figure was 9 percent.
In just the last ten year years, the number of U.S. medical students choosing to enter family medicine has fallen by 50 percent according to a report released by the Texas Primary Care Coalition (see chart below).

One reason medical students shun primary care is the relatively low pay. As the chart and table below reveal, over the last decade, dermatologists, radiologists gastroenterologists and orthopedic surgeons have seen their incomes skyrocket while the incomes of family doctors and internists lag far behind.

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With Medicare’s financing unraveling, Medicare reform will need to be high on the next president’s agenda. In a new report from The Century Foundation, fellow and HealthBeat Blog editor Maggie Mahar (www.healthbeatblog.org) points out that past proposals for containing Medicare’s costs, such as putting a cap on physicians’ fees or requiring beneficiaries to pay more for their care, have not worked. She calls for a fundamental set of reforms that would not only save money but also improve the quality of care that beneficiaries receive.

You will find the report at www.tcf.org later today.

Over at the Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch http://www.prwatch.org/node/7748  Judith Siers-Poisson writes:

“With the start of the school year, debate has heated up again about Gardasil, Merck‘s vaccine against human papillomavirus. Since writing my series of four articles on The Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer last year, I have continued to track the developments

“The push for mandatory vaccination continues, and many of its supporters have received money from Merck, including Women in Government, about whom I wrote extensively in my article, "Women in Government: Merck’s Trojan Horse." Despite a palpable turning of the tide against mandates, Women in Government still swims against the current. In a 2008 report titled "State of Cervical Cancer Prevention in America," WIG continued to push for mandates and gave higher scores to states that have introduced or passed legislation for this purpose.”

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Each presidential candidate offers a blueprint for health care reform. Neither can expect to see his plan enacted whole—legislators will leave their fingerprints all over any proposal. And, if truth be told, neither plan is perfect. Each proposal is blinkered in its own way; each ignores just how difficult true reform will be. I very much doubt that national health insurance will become a reality in the next year.

That said, I believe that we can take steps toward reform in 2009 if we begin thinking clearly—and honestly—about exactly what it is that we want and what it will cost. To that end, I believe that in-depth analysis of each candidate’s proposal can help underline the core ideological differences between conservatives, libertarians and progressives, and highlight the economic realities that any reform plan will have to face.

Recently, opponents of each plan have offered their critiques in Health Affairs (here and here) and supporters have defended their favorites  here  and here. Inevitably, many readers found the critiques too partisan. At the same time, they complained that rebuttals from the home team “read more like a stump speech with details glossed over and facts overlooked.”   

Readers are still looking for an unbiased, in-depth report on the two plans that clarifies the details and the differences. Earlier this week, the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization, published an assessment of the two proposals that sets out to do just that. Overall, the Institute’s report seemed to me remarkably fair—and certainly worth discussion. 

The Strengths of the Obama Plan 

First, the Institute notes, rightly, that Obama’s plan would “substantially increase access to affordable and adequate coverage for those with the highest health care needs, including those with chronic illnesses” by:

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Yesterday, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named 25 new MacArthur Fellows for 2008. The recipients will each receive $500,000 in "no strings attached" support over the next five years. The new Fellows work across a broad spectrum of endeavors and include a neurobiologist, a saxophonist, a critical care physician, an urban farmer, an optical physicist, a sculptor, a geriatrician, a historian of medicine, and an inventor of musical instruments. All were selected for their creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future.

HeathBeat has written about both Meier (the geriatrician) and Pronovost (the critical care physician). To read their stories, click here and here. Meier also is a member of the working group on Medicare Reform that I have put together here at the Century Foundation.

Please feel free to share your thoughts/comments about these pioneers and their work here on HealthBeat.

Today, The Guardian UK published a story that should be shocking–but isn’t: "More than Half of U.S. Drug Studies Never See the Light of Day." This serves as further proof–if we needed it– that pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to control what doctors and patients know, and don’t know, about new drugs.

The story follows below.

More than half of US drug safety studies never see the light of day
Only 43% of the evidence of safety and efficacy that the US Food and Drug Administration uses to approve drugs is published in scientific journals. The authors of the survey say this amounts to "scientific misconduct."

James Randerson, guardian.co.uk,Tuesday September 23 2008 10:46 BST

The results of more than half of all clinical trials that demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of new drugs
are not published within five years of the drug going on the market,
according to an analysis of 90 drugs approved by US regulators between
1998 and 2000.

The researchers, who traced the publication or otherwise of 909 separate clinical trials
in the scientific literature, wrote that the failure of drug companies
to publish the evidence relating to new medicines amounted to
"scientific misconduct". They said it "harms the public good" by
preventing informed decisions by doctors and patients about new
medicines and by hampering future scientific work.

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