Senator Tom Daschle on Why Health Reform Is Good for Doctors and Patients

Why are you advocating for health reform?

We need to reform our health care system in part because we have so many Americans who don't have good health insurance. Forty-eight percent of those, according to one study, don't get the care they need because they don't feel they've got the insurance to go to the doctor in the first place. Eighteen thousand people a year die because they simply don't have insurance. Fifty million are uninsured. We also have a serious quality problem. You know, the Commonwealth Organization recently noted that, of the 19 industrialized countries, we rank 19th in overall quality--lowest in life expectancy, lowest in infant mortality, lowest in women's health.

And then, finally, we're spending way too much money. Costs are going through the roof. We now spend about 8,000 dollars in taxes, premiums, and out-of-pocket expenses for every man, woman, and child in the country. I have a good friend whose name is Doctor Tom Dean. He lives in Westonton Springs, and he's not only a fantastic physician, he's on the MedPak board, but he has cancer, and he has struggled with that cancer now for a couple of hears. He's going to make it, and he's going to continue to give back to his community, but I think of a Tom Dean struggling with cancer, still having to realize that, with all the problems we have, he's getting good care. But, how much I would like to be able to free up his ability, not only to make him well, but to give him the right and the opportunity to serve the thousands of people in his community with better care than they're getting now.

How will health reform help doctors and their patients?

Well, health care reform, I think, is focused on making doctors' jobs easier, and Dr. Dean is probably as aware of this as anybody in the country. There are four different ways that I think it's going to make it easier. First and foremost, we're hoping to reduce the red tape. We now have 19th century administrative rooms, and 21st century operating rooms. We're going to bring the administrative rooms into the 21st century with good HIT--health information technology--reducing the paperwork and improving the ability to spend time on patients and less on bureaucracy.

Secondly, by expanding access, Dr. Dean is going to be able to help people in his community who can't afford to walk through the doors to get his care now. And so, that's going to make his job even better, knowing that they're not going to have to go to the emergency room--they're going to be able to go right through the front door and get the care they need.

The third thing we're going to try to do is to bring the prevention and the tremendous effort on primary care into the mainstream with health care by changing the way we pay doctors, by encouraging more primary care, and by recognizing that we need more primary care doctors. That's really going to be critical, and it's very important for us to encourage the recruitment of, and the training of, and ultimately the extraordinary utilization of more primary care doctors--something Dr. Dean needs badly.

Finally, we want to do as much as possible to make his job easier by giving him a bigger tool box: Evidence-based medicine, good payment reform based on value not volume, recognizing that we do as much as possible to ensure that best practices are part of good health care. That, too, could help Dr. Dean a lot.