health care plans - where the candidates stand

the conference that i went to in DC was the ACP, the American College of Physicians. it's the largest internal medicine conference in the country. you can go to lectures on everything from a refresher on diabetes to practice management to health policy. this year i chose a lot of forums / lectures on health policy and caring for the uninsured. part of the reason is because i work in a clinic for the uninsured - which i thought would be mostly the homeless, but in actuality i have 1 homeless patient and the rest are the working poor. most of the reason is that i think our system is seriously broken. it never gets fixed because of a myth that's out there, that america provides the best health care in the world. that is clearly not true, and the acp has the data to support it. more on this in a sec.

one of the highlights was a forum in which each presidential candidate had sent a representative to talk about his/her health care plans. the room was packed - there had to have been at least a thousand doctors in there. the clinton and obama guys stood up and gave very polished presentations, with powerpoint slides and lots of details about her/his respective policies. the mccain guy stood up and said that all that sounds like a lot of good vocabulary but was actually political jargon, and then presented absolutely nothing concrete, had no illustrative slides and clearly was not prepared for his audience. now, i don't know if the mccain plan is really this disorganized, but i do know that he really poorly chose his representative. the first question from the audience was as follows: "Hello, my name is XY and I'm from Z. I'm a Republican. Mr. Miller [the McCain guy], you need to go back to Senator McCain and tell him: You need to do better than that." the audience erupted into a standing ovation.

the acp has analyzed the health care plans of many industrialized countries and has come up with five basic tenets of any workable health care plan. this is the article that analyzes how well the US measures up. Sure, we have the best access to surgical services. But we fall behind (and sometimes embarrassingly far behind) every other county in just about every other measure. http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/0000605-200801010-00196v1

1. Guarantee by law that everyone has access to affordable health coverage. Coverage should be without regard to their place of employment, place of residence within the United States or income.
2. Provide every person with access to a primary care physician. Create workforce and payment policies to increase the numbers of primary care physicians, recognize the value of primary care, and support care organized through a patient-centered medical home.
3. Increase public investment in health information technologies (HIT). Provide positive incentives to physicians to overcome the HIT cost barrier.
4. Reduce administrative expenses. Create a uniform billing system for all health insurance transactions at the point of care. Reform the medical liability system using proven legal reforms.
5. Increase funding for research. Fund basic and applied medical research, health services research and independent research on the effectiveness, costs and benefits of different treatments compared to each other.

on this page, they analyze how each candidate's plan measure up to this. i'm putting the link here so i remember to read this in more depth.