The Issue
“We have the best healthcare system in the world, and we must work together to expand access to affordable healthcare to the uninsured. However, in the process of expanding care, we cannot create a weaker system for the 80 percent of Americans who are happy with their coverage.”Former President, American Medical Association
The United States is the leader in the advancement of medical technology and medicine. For this reason, people from around the world come to our country for treatment. Every day, in communities all over America, life-saving decisions are made in doctors’ offices, hospitals and clinics. Inside these medical facilities, health professionals and patients work together to achieve the best possible solution for delivering the proper course of treatment to meet each patient’s needs.
There are, however, many ways in which the health care system in the United States can, and should be improved. The Coalition to Protect Patients’ (CPPR) rights is dedicated to achieving those goals.
The recently passed “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” drastically changed our country’s health care system. We at CPPR believe that some of these changes— for example, the provisions meant to ensure that comparative effectiveness research (CER) stays patient centered—will have a positive effect on American health care.
The bill’s CER provisions will help encourage openness and transparency in CER and call for the establishment of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which will facilitate CER and help ensure that research is used to provide patients with valuable information instead of using it as a cost cutting mechanism.
However, there are many issues concerning our health care system that were not addressed by the new law, or actually made worse by the new law’s design. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act removed much of the medical decision making from the patient and physician and placed it in the hands of government bureaucrats. In an attempt to cover more people, it failed to consider the quality of care they would end up with or the impact that the changes would have on those who already had insurance that they were happy with.
We at the Coalition to Protect Patients’ Rights will continue to fight for patients. The Coalition will focus on our health care system’s need for meaningful medical malpractice reform, a permanent fix to the flawed “SGR” formula, an end to the dangerous practice of therapeutic substitution and to limit damage caused by severe cuts to Medicare including those resulting from the flawed Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).