Health Care Reform by Dean Slade, Guest Columnist, the State Newspaper.

Dean Slade is the director of grants and planning at Eau Claire Cooperative Health Centers and the designer of "The Plan", a comprehensive primary health care model with 350 members, partially funded by a grant from the United Way of the Midlands, which provides health care services for individuals and employers for an application fee of $20 and $25 per month.
Slade: Health care reform must focus on prevention, good medicine.
Poor health affects us all, and the failure of our health system to properly prevent or diagnose and manage disease is the driving factor behind all health care reform proposals. We need a health care system that not only treates us when we get sick but also helps us to manage our health and prevent disease through early detection and intervention. At the center of change has to be how health care is delivered and not who or how we pay for it. Until we consider changes in the current delivery system, health care will not be more affordable. Funding an enhanced primary care system with first-dollar reimbursement and a focus on disease prevention, disease management, and care coordination will afford us the opportunity to control rising cost and help us to truly reform the delivery system. There is no relationship between people's need for health care and their ability to pay.
For health care to be of measurable quality, afforadable and accessable, it has to be flexible enough to address the needs of the working poor, the unemployed, the uninsured, and uninsurable, for example, the diabetic, the hypertensive, the cancer patient, the epileptic, the mentally ill, the disabled, the aged, and the infirmed. It is impossible to have quality without accountability. The patient has to belong to the Doctor, and the Doctor to the patient, wrapped in a network of care. As long as price is the arbiter of access, you can never have a quality standard because many people do not make logical decisions about their health and money.Parents sacrifice their health for their children, their spouses, their parents.
When we talk about prevention, I think we are talking as much about being proactive. Our current health care model focuses on a reactive hospital model. We allow a problaem to grow to a heightened level of need, and then we throw everything at it. A proactive approach woul impliment a system to: (1) Strengthen the primary care neetwork, (2) Insist that everyone has a primary care physician, (3) Require that diagnosis and treatment be defined by a protocol that has measurable outcomes.
What should we do: Focus on primary care. We drive Doctor's away from primary care, lose our monitoring ystem and waste our country's wealth on a broken system.
Re-examine employer-based health care. Employer based health insurance has failed us. It bankrupted General Motors, bankrupted the city of Columbia, and forces unrelated to the nature of entrepreneurship and business manipulates its structure.
We must insist that our government and legislators, examine the premise upon which our health care systems are built and how the poor, minorities, and rural populations are disproportionately impacted by this broken system.