From the Editors’ Desk: The Patient-centered Medical Home and Our Future Health-care System

Excerpt

For more than 2 decades, I have worked in a single-payer, nonprofit health-care system run by the Department of Defense. As a primary care physician in this system, I do not have to deal with health insurance billing and do not have to worry about whether or not my patients can afford the medications I provide. When I admit patients to the hospital, I don’t have to worry that they will lose their house or their children will no longer be able to go to college. If my patients need to stay in the hospital a few extra days, I don’t have someone hassling me. When I discharge someone, I know they’ll be able to be seen by an appropriate physician soon. Despite this freedom, my system’s length of stay, per capita health-care costs and readmission rates are much lower than national averages. In my system, the gap between primary care physicians and specialists is small; we are all comfortably middle-class. …