NPA members Rupin Thakkar and Bob Crittendon were appointed a member of the Workforce Advisory Group and Lisa Plymate has been appointed to the Low Income Populations Committee of the Health Reform Implementation in Washington State. Congratulations to both! NPA appreciates your commitment to health care reform implementation.

A little late but it too a while to get these pictures done (they are hand developed). As a strong group of NPA leaders, we had our the Monday after our National Meeting. What was remarkable? In 2007, the whole group fit on picture. Now? I count 24 people here (including me behind the lens) and that wasn’t even everybody! Next time in DC we need a bus!

Cheers to the U.S. House of Representatives!!

On last evening, the House took a great step toward ending discrimination toward a group of patients with the passage of the “Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007,” named after the late Senator from Minnesota who was a passionate advocate for mental health parity. I salute Reps. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I. and Jim Radstad, R-Minn. for their bipartisan effort to end stigma and right this severe wrong with regards to healthcare in the United States.

The Senate sponsors, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico and Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, will work to help send it to the president for signature. This bill is so important. It pains me to have to tell patients who receive all of their care for primary care and specialty services at our hospital that I can not see them or that they have very high co-pays.

It is embarrassing and shameful that a physician in the house, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga, would not vote for this bi-partisan bill. When will the medical community remember that the brain is still an organ and is vulnerable to illness and should not be separated from the body when we think about the practice of medicine.

Write your Senators! This bill needs to be passed!

I think we have gone done the road of separate but equal once before. It did not work then and does not work now.

“We are one. If we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.”
– Bayard Rustin, Civil Rights Activist, Organizer of the 1963 March on Washington

Now is the time to join the National Physicians Alliance at its meeting in Houston, TX. If you have never been to an NPA event, you are truly missing out. Missing out on energy. You may arrive tired and disheartened, but you leave energized and full of momentum to make a difference. Whether you would like to join in NPA’s efforts to ensure the availability of quality health care to all in the US or to explore how big business looks to compromise your practice as a physician and the health of your patients, you can find it with this group.

Certainly, one of the best things about a National Physicians Alliance meeting is finding like minded physicians who are in the struggle to maintain the integrity of our profession, and who strive daily to put their patients first. That is what excites me. It is an exciting time in our country and everyone is talking about change. Now is the time for physicians like us to make a stand and be heard.

When I leave an NPA meeting I truly get what Bayard Rustin was saying. We are truly one!

(link to register for the NPA meeting)

The Republican Presidential CNN/YouTube debate is just around the corner (November 28th).  As with the Democratic Presidential debate hosted by CNN/YouTube, Americans are submitting videos of questions they have for the candidates. 

Above, the national leaders of the American Medical Student Association, the independent medical student organization with over 50,000 members, from which the National Physicians Alliance was born, framed the healthcare debate with a well-crafted question for the candidates.  Friends, these are the future leaders of American organized medicine, and there are thousands of them, and thankfully, they’re progressive, patient-centered, and dedicated to the public health of America.

Hope comes in many forms, and this is just one of them…

This week in the New York Times Week in Review, there is a column stipulating that we should pay doctors less.

I wholeheartedly agree.

If medicine truly is the profession that I believe it is, you should hear a chorus of doctors saying, “Fix this system, even if it means paying me less.”

(Read more…)

Past AMSA President, recent medical school graduate and new NPA member Leana Wen is traveling in Africa this week with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. She was selected to provide a perspective on the healthcare system in Rwanda and Uganda. During the trip, she is posting her thoughts and ideas on a blog, Two for the Road.
Today’s blog is about Rwandan refugees and the challenges they face obtaining health care, but the hope of the Millennium Villages Project. Tomorrow, she’ll be talking with Dr. Paul Farmer, who gave the keynote address at NPA’s annual meeting last March.

Today in my continuity clinic, one of the staff physicians was talking about his experiences on Capitol Hill where he has lobbying on behalf of primary care physicians. He said that every meeting that he has ever had has ended with the member of Congress saying (in effect): “While this is an important issue, it just isn’t one that has an constituency.”

How can that be? Why is there not a “constituency” for the issues that doctors talk about? After all, everyone will at some point need a doctor. Why are doctors ineffective on the Hill?

Perhaps it’s because we talk about the wrong things. A colleague conducted a study where he asked Congressional staffers about the issues that physicians lobbied for on the Hill. He discovered that doctors came to Congress mostly to talk about their own reimbursement rates. If that is the only thing that members of Congress are hearing from physicians, no wonder they respond with “there is no constituency for that issue.”
More revealing, the Congressional offices thought physicians were effective advocates, and would be particularly effective on issues that affected our patients directly. Our patients are, after all, their constituents.

And that’s what attracted me to the NPA – it brings together physicians from all specialties who want to be advocates for our patients. By working for what is best for our patients, we can achieve the goals of why we went into medicine in the first place.

Physicians can – and are – effective advocates. And we achieve the most success on Capitol Hill when we address issues that directly affect our patients.

Welcome to NPA Blog. Here you will find a community of physicians who have chosen to look back and look forward. Doctors who long for the return of the values of our profession of service, itegrity and advocacy with the modern spin of an organization that utilizes the tools and ideas of modern times. At the National Physicians Alliance we are striving to create an organization that is nimble,transparent and democratic. To do this we need all of you. There are over 800,000 physicians in this country. Even the largest of our organizations represents a small fraction of those docs. We need a voice. The country needs us to step up as advocates and defenders of what is best, not for doctors, but for the health of our people.

At the NPA we are all here for a dream, a wish, a vision carried over from our days as students.

We need a home.

A place were we can reach across specialties and interests and find each other.

A place we can find support, friendship and the synergy that comes when people of good hearts and altruistic motives come together and make magic.

We need it to fight the cynicism and despair of our times and our world that taints our work.

We need it to nurture young physicians in their ideals and activism.

We need a place to celebrate each other and the miracles large and small you accomplish every day.

We need a place we can go where we can be reminded what an amazing honor and privilege it is to have another put their life in your hands, share their vulnerabilities and nakedness and witness the beginning and end of their time on earth.

Then there is the other reason for the NPA.

Somehow our profession has lost its way.

The obsession with the business of medicine has, like Harry Potters Dementors, sucked the joy out of our jobs.

I believe this is at the core of the void so many of us feel about our work.

For decades now, the focus on financial issues, in particular by the AMA, to the near exclusion of all others, at least in the political and press worlds, has contributed mightily to the loss of trust the public has with our profession.

Our patients question our motives when it comes to decisions about their care and rightly so.

Did we choose that drug because we just had a free lunch or because it is the cheapest and best medicine for that person?

We all swear we are NOT influenced by these things, but there are rafts of research showing it is, in fact, so and ask yourself, if a pharmaceutical company would really spend the equivalent of $12,000 a year per physician on these things if it wasn?t effective.

Today we are no longer this country?s most trusted profession. We now trail nurses and pharmacists.

Now,I’m not so naive as to believe issues of money and financing medical care can be ignored.

Not at least in this country.

Medicine is a business and a big one.

Billions of dollars are being spent and made in this industry annually.

Lest you think I?m a total socialist, I’ll tell you I feel entitled to a piece of that action.

I have sacrificed a good part of my life; probably health and for sure, well being on this alter of medicine.

I want a good life.

I?m grateful we have strong trade associations working on these issues on my behalf, for my compensation and my autonomy to practice without being micromanaged by non-medical entities.

The question I often ask myself however is, how much is enough and at what cost does it come?

The problem is that something is missing. We are missing a different voice in the public discourse.

One that focuses not on issues of physician self interest but one that speaks for physicians as advocates for health.

Many of our professional organizations have become so distracted or politically beholden they have become silent on issues that so clearly scream for a physician voice.

Perhaps no issue illustrated this as clearly as the Terry Schiavo case.

The medical condition of a patient was discussed on the floor of Congress, in the halls of justice and the in court of public opinion, yet organized medicine did nothing to bring medical, scientific sanity to a country craving answers on this issue.

It is time for this voice.

A physician voice that is not so compromised by conflicts of interest that it cannot advocate for the lowest cost medications for seniors.

A voice who will call for the radical overhaul of the malpractice system that fairly compensates all patients injured by poor care, promotes the safest medical practices and stops the waste of frivolous lawsuits.

A voice who advocates for a system of care that first and foremost, ensures that every person in this country can receive affordable, quality healthcare that allows them to reach their full potential.

This after all is supposed to be the promise of a democratic society.

This, then is the mission of the NPA:

“The National Physicians Alliance is founded to restore physicians’ primary emphasis on the core values of our profession: service, integrity, and advocacy. The NPA offers a professional home for physicians seeking creative collaboration and mutual support. As a
diverse physician community, we work to improve health and well being, and to ensure equitable, affordable, high quality health care for all people.”

I encourage you all to join us. Explore this blog, our website, join a committee, make a donation. Help us build a strong community of physicians whose primary mission is to first and foremost to safeguard and improve the health or our people.

Thank you,

Lydia

President and Founder, NPA