Health Care Reform Essay - Donated by a Friend

1) Patients must be the most powerful people in the American health care system.
2) To be fully empowered, they must have full information, delivered in plain English, in a timely fashion and sparing no detail or qualification.
3) Patients shall have full access to their entire medical record, in a readable, portable format, and with clinical diagnoses and observations translated into terms the patient can clearly understand.
4) Doctors should make every effort to be accessible to their patients in person, via telephone or e-mail. They must be held accountable for follow-up.
5) All those who work in medical practices should be fully trained and authorized to assist patients when doctors themselves are not immediately available.
6) Medical offices should embrace the latest technologies to maximize patient service, and diagnostic and billing accuracy.
7) Patients must be fully informed of all fees for service and any required follow-up, and doctors should be forthcoming about alternative treatments which may be as effective and more cost-effective.
8) Doctors and specialists must be more collaborative in the development of treatment plans.
9) Our system for training medical professionals must place as much emphasis on patient sensitivities as on the practice of medicine itself. However qualified or talented a medical student may be, hospitalized patients or those under treatment for chronic conditions must always have confidence that their cases are being actively managed by senior, experienced physicians.
10) Government policies and programs must incentivize both doctors and patients to favor wellness over treatment, and in so doing, provide doctors the means to practice the foregoing principles. And those programs, too, must become standardized, uncomplicated, easy to understand and navigate, more afforadable and responsive to the needs of the patient.