The Invisible Work
Of the thousands upon thousands of pages of policy I’ve been reading for school lately about health care reform, one recurring theme is how primary care is going to save healthcare. With our almighty power of coordinating the care of patients, paying attention to their quality metrics, making them do preventive care, switching them to the cheapest generic meds on their health plans, and viewing the latest fancy high tech interventions with our skeptical scientific eyes, we, the simple heirs to the old GPs, favor the time tested and cost effective evidence based care over the shiny and glamorous expensive new stuff that pays for our colleagues' Italian sports cars but makes little difference in the quantity or quality of our patients' lives. In his account of the Affordable Care Act’s design and passage, one of the key advisors in the Obama administration, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm's brother) writes of the role envisioned for primary care doctors in the Accountable Care Or...
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