NEW YORK—As the health care crisis reemerges in news headlines, an issues paper released today says American physicians are poised to play a pivotal role in our nation’s health care delivery system.
Released today by the Open Society Institute, part of the Soros foundations network, the new "Ideas" paper says that while doctors continually struggle to balance the financial demands of corporate-driven health care with the needs of patients, physicians by virtue of affluence and public trust are in a prime position to advocate beyond the needs of an individual patient and bring greater equity to the delivery of health care.
“Physicians must challenge a system of care that is structured on behalf of shareholders and speak out on setting new national health care priorities,” say David J. Rothman, Ph.D., chairman of the board of advisors of the Medicine as a Profession (MAP) program at OSI and Tom O’Toole, M.D., program officer for MAP at OSI-Baltimore.
“If the medical profession is to fulfill the covenant that exists between the doctor and the patient, a new order of professionalism marked by advocacy and collective action has to emerge,” add Rothman and O’Toole, co-authors of the feature Ideas article, “Physicians and the Body Politic; Redefining the Dimensions of Care.”
Rothman has written extensively about the history of medicine, as well as current health policy and practice, ethics of human experimentation, and medical professionalism. O’Toole is a general internist on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he is the associate director of the Urban Health Institute and conducts health services research related to access to care for vulnerable populations.
Ideas also profiles the work of Dr. Michael Fine, M.D., a Soros Advocacy Fellow and a Rhode Island family practitioner who is part of a growing movement within the medical community that recognizes the importance of population-based intervention strategies. “Physicians need the community organizing skills to approach the population base,” Fine says.
According to Fine, the challenge is to make community organizing, often driven by instinct and experimentation, become legitimate in the medical community, which is taught to act on conclusions rather than hypotheses.
Note to reporters and assignment editors: Interviews with Rothman, O’Toole and Fine are available by contacting Amy Weil at Aweil@sorosny.org or 212-548-0381. OSI also maintains a list of our grantees that are available to write op-eds and provide information on health care.
Current and past issues of “Ideas for an Open Society” are available on the web or in hard copy by contacting info.USprograms@sorosny.org.
OSI’s program on Medicine as a Profession (MAP) seeks to invigorate the principles of professionalism in American medicine and apply them so as to advance trust, quality, and integrity in American health care. To these ends, over the past two years, MAP has designed and implemented a number of initiatives. It funds physician-consumer alliances that aim to reduce the influence of marketplace values in medicine and better secure access to services. MAP administers a fellowship program for physicians to promote greater physician engagement in civil society. It has also organized a nationwide service and advocacy program for medical students. Finally, in partnership with United Hospital Fund, MAP is conducting a series of forums which bring together leaders of the medical profession to analyze the current and future challenges to professionalism.
The Open Society Institute, a private operating and grantmaking foundation, is part of the network of foundations, created and funded by George Soros, active in more than 50 countries around the world.
OSI's U.S. Programs seek to strengthen democracy in the United States by addressing barriers to opportunity and justice, broadening public discussion about such barriers, and assisting marginalized groups to participate equally in civil society and to make their voices heard. OSI U.S. Programs challenges over-reliance on the market by advocating appropriate government responsibility for human needs and promoting public interest and service values in law, medicine, and the media, by supporting initiatives in a range of areas.
These areas include access to justice for low and moderate income people; judicial independence; ending the death penalty; reducing gun violence and over-reliance on incarceration; drug policy reform; inner-city education and youth programs; fair treatment of immigrants; reproductive health and choice; campaign finance reform; and improved care of the dying.