Your editorial on Sept. 6, ”In health care, remedies but no cures,”
which evaluates the health care plans of President Bush and Gov. Clinton, misses an important element to implementing successful health care reform. Both fail to address the underlying problems of our overspecialized physician corps.
An essential component to providing access to health care is ensuring adequate numbers of primary care (or generalist) physicians-includin g family physicians, general pediatricians, general internists and obstetrician/
gynecologists. Family physicians can provide a broader range of health care services to the majority of our citizens, and deliver care more cost-effectively.
Family physicians comprise only 11 percent of all physicians, yet provide more than 30 percent of the health care in the United States. Primary care physicians, including family physicians, comprise only one-third of the total physician population; the remainder are sub-specialists with training of limited scope.
The U.S. needs to reverse the sub-specialist/generalist physician ratio. Congress` Council on Graduate Medical Education states that at least 50 percent of physicians should be in primary care; 25 percent should be family physicians.
Unless this problem is addressed, any health care reform is doomed to failure.
