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This Week in Primary Care
The Movement Is Writing Its Next Chapter
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One sign of a growing movement is when its ideas begin showing up everywhere.
Over the past several months, members and friends of Primary Care for All Americans (PC4AA) have been writing, speaking, organizing, and advocating across the country, from our first national summit to statehouses, community meetings, and medical journals.
This week, we’re highlighting some recent writing from people connected to this growing movement, and some encouraging evidence that these ideas are translating into action.
PC4AA board member Sara Pastoor wrote a great recap of PC4AA’s first national summit. She finished with our president’s three asks to close the day in Cambridge:
“...stay connected to someone you met here; invite one person to coffee and start a workgroup; ask them to bring one more person in two weeks. The message to take home: when your community takes back control of how care is delivered and paid for, that's not just a health decision. It's an act of democracy.”
That act of democracy rippled out from Cambridge as PC4AA members talked with their neighbors and legislators in Brookline, the Berkshires, Lenox, and New Bedford. Within weeks, the MA Senate passed landmark primary care legislation and then – we are happy to update from last issue– the MA House passed a bill to match! The MA State Work Group is celebrating by spinning up new local workgroups in Cambridge and the Berkshires; if you know someone who would make a great organizer, please let us know.
PC4AA leaders Judith Steinberg and Katherine Gergen Barnett published their Lessons Learned in the Fight to Strengthen the Foundation of Healthcare, drawing on 50 years of collective service to primary care. They write that federal policy change needs buy-in from both the Executive and Legislative branches, which listen best to constituents and aligned stakeholders speaking with a unified message. Implementation happens on various timescales, looks different across different agencies, and benefits from strategic data collection. They urge those who would strengthen primary care at any level to define it well, speak up with stories, act in solidarity across disciplines, put the power in patients’ hands, and attend to payment.
Unfortunately, attending to payment is complicated by the consolidation of healthcare, writes friend-of-PC4AA Yul Ejnes, a primary-care internist and national leader in two physician professional organizations. Health systems, which now employ over 80% of physicians from 50% eight years ago, have arisen as powerful intermediaries between healthcare financing and front-line clinicians. That changes where advocacy needs to be directed and raises larger questions about who controls healthcare dollars and how those dollars are allocated.
Every person in America should have access to a trusted primary care relationship. Getting there will require research, policy, legislation, and funding. But most of all, it will require a movement. And that movement is growing.
Our August “Teach-In/Learn-In”: Join our friends in California
Our partners at the California Physicians Alliance (CaPA) are hosting an event on August 16th 1pm PT/4pm ET marking the anniversary of Medicare and continuing the discussion about how we build a healthcare system that works for everyone.
With some of PC4AA's favorite teachers– Michael Fine, Kevin Grumbach, Ann Greiner, and Jonathan Fitzsimon– think of it as our unofficial August Teach-In, and another opportunity to connect state-level work with the growing national movement for primary care for all.
We hope you’ll join us.
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