EP 930 Primary Care Needs to Be Foundation of Health Care Reform

If more Americans regularly saw primary care doctors, many lives–and billions of dollars–could be saved.  The preventative care they provide is crucial as a foundation to the entire health care system.  Yet, the fee-for-service model is an inefficient one and should be replaced by a value-based approach, according to Dr. Troyen Brennan and adjunct professor of health policy and management at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the author of “Wonderful and Broken: The Complex Reality of Primary Care in the United States.”  He goes on to explain the value-based model in our podcast and forecasts a movement in that direction in the coming years.  And he pays great homage to primary care physicians in the book while recognizing that they are underpaid, overworked, and often incentivized to move into higher-paying specialties while patients face provider shortages and many live in ever-growing primary-care deserts.